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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



THE GREAT POETS 
AS RELIGIOUS TEACHERS 



BY 



JOHN H. MORISON 




'>>* COPYJtK 

NEW YORK 

HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS 

1886 



.141 



Copyright, 1885, by John H. Morison. 
All rights reserved. 



CONTENTS. 



Introduction 4 

I. The Imagination in Religion . . 75 

II. The Great Poets as Religious Teachers . 39 

III. Dante 45 

IV. Shakspere 83 

V. Goethe • . . . . . 775 

VI. Old Testament Writers . . . 143 

VII. The Ideal Teachings of Jesus • . 163 

VIII. The End i 93 




INTRODUCTION. 




flHYSICAL science must always 
hold an important place in the 
work of mental discipline and cul- 
ture. It may do what no other pursuit can 
in forming habits of exact observation, 
comparison, classification, and analysis. 
Apart, therefore, from its practical uses, 
it is an essential branch of education. 
But, standing by itself, it is only a branch, 
and that not the highest. Wonderful as 
its methods and discoveries are, it does 
not undertake to comprehend or appre- 
ciate the highest laws of the universe, or 
to call into exercise man's highest qual- 
ities. The sense of right and wrong is as 
necessary in the investigation of morals 
as sight and touch are in our physical re- 
searches, and requires as keen an exercise 



6 The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

of the intellect in arranging and applying 
the facts which are thus discovered. Here 
we are introduced into the great field 
of human conduct. Beyond the sense of 
right and wrong is the faculty by which we 
rise to a conception of the vital or efficient 
forces on which the outward universe, in 
its multitudinous operations, depends. 
And through this higher faculty we recog- 
nize still another order of facts. A new 
sun shines around us, and creates for us a 
new heaven and a new earth, exalting sci- 
ence into a divine teacher, bringing new 
sanctities into our homes and extending 
them through our wider relations with one 
another. It is only as these three great 
departments of knowledge are brought to- 
gether that each finds in the others its true 
counterpart, and so is enabled to fill out its 
legitimate place as a means of education. 

They who, by the common consent of 
mankind, have been looked up to with the 
greatest reverence as imperial rulers in the 
world of creative thought, rising highest 



Introduction. y 

and penetrating farthest into the secrets of 
the universe, have been the seers or poets. 
By their revelations, and in accordance 
with the wants and laws of our nature, the 
unseen world of spiritual thought and life 
has been laid open to us, and thrown its hal- 
lowing influences around us ; making itself 
felt as a familiar presence from childhood 
to age with the individual, and from the in- 
fancy of the race onward with increasing 
sanctity and power in every new develop- 
ment. 

Owing to instincts which are often safer 
guides than our most elaborate theories, 
the favorite stories and songs of children, 
and the folk-lore which has found its way 
everywhere into human hearts and homes, 
are made up from traditions which appeal 
most vividly to the imagination, and people 
the world with ideal conceptions. Such 
are the books like Bunyan's "Pilgrim's 
Progress/' of which thousands upon thou- 
sands of copies are demanded by each suc- 
cessive generation. In accordance with 



8 The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

these same instincts, and for reasons which 
have commended themselves to wise and 
thoughtful men for many generations, the 
great poets have been recognized as august 
and effective teachers, and, at the head of 
those who have given the most perfect ex- 
amples of literature, have had a leading 
place in the higher systems of education. 
It has been supposed that by studying them 
in their native tongues the young would 
become most thoroughly imbued with 
their mind and temper. Their sympathies 
would thus be refined and enlarged. Their 
higher faculties would be called into ex- 
ercise. Drawn into closer companionship 
with those great souls and sharing their 
highest thoughts, they would naturally rise 
with them into a higher sphere of life, and 
unconsciously become endowed with an in- 
tellectual, aesthetic, and moral dignity, re- 
finement, and simplicity which would hard- 
ly be reached so effectually in any other 
way. 

But now the vast accumulations of wealth, 



Introduction. g 

with the multiplication of material com- 
forts and luxuries, are turning us away 
from these things. And the tendency of 
the age is still further increased by the 
marvellous inventions and discoveries of 
science, opening as they do fields of inves- 
tigation in any one of which a lifetime 
may be spent without looking beyond its 
walls. Things visible and tangible assume 
to be the only realities, and demand for 
themselves the foremost place in every 
wise system of education. Science, which 
should include every department of knowl- 
edge, is narrowed down to the world of 
matter, which is supposed to furnish the 
only substantial basis of truth. The popu- 
lar literature of the age is marked by the 
same characteristics. Even the ablest writ- 
ers of fiction, for example George Eliot, 
fail to rise into the empyrean where the 
pure imagination should find itself most at 
home, amid the ideal conceptions best fit- 
ted to meet its infinite longings. If this 
tendency to materialism is allowed to go 



io The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

on without recognizing the light which 
comes to our higher faculties from the 
higher facts of the universe, it can end 
only in atheism and spiritual death. If 
our most advanced schools of learning 
should give in to this tendency ; if, instead 
of seeking to call out all our faculties, and 
most of all the highest, so as to make men 
of the loftiest and broadest type, they 
should lower and narrow their standard, 
thinking it of more importance to make 
specialists than men, the change is one 
which may awaken very serious apprehen- 
sions with those who look to the best in- 
terests of humanity. 

From the beginning, and more and 
more as they advance in their education, 
at home and at school, in the books they 
study and the literature they read, our 
children should be imbued with the fact 
that there are laws higher than those of 
matter, and objects of more transcendent 
interest than any that can be dealt with 
from a purely materialistic point of view. 



Introduction, 1 1 

Without a recognition of these higher laws 
and agencies, the material comforts which 
science and the mechanical arts are pro- 
viding in such boundless profusion become 
instruments of moral and intellectual dete- 
rioration. The loftier ideals of life, and 
with them its nobler aspirations and ambi- 
tions, are lost. And when they are gone, 
wealth, all the more because of its abun- 
dance, enters as a corrupting influence 
everywhere, and taints the atmosphere in 
which it moves. 

A liberal education is not confined to 
institutions of learning. Sometimes it is 
gained by private investigations and stud- 
ies in moments snatched from a busy life; 
and sometimes, almost without books, it is 
gained, amid pressing circumstances, from 
the complications of business, from inci- 
dental intercourse with accomplished men 
and women, aided by habits of solitary 
meditation. But wherever and however it 
is sought, its office, and indeed the great 
purpose of life in training and educating 



12 The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

men and women, is to gall out what is 
noblest and best in them ; to inspire them 
with high aims ; to enlarge and purify their 
minds by familiarity with the grandest 
thoughts and lives ; and especially to exer- 
cise their highest faculties by the truest 
and largest conceptions of nature, man, 
and God, The great poets, seers, proph- 
ets, who have been the vanguard in the 
progress of the race, and who, by lifting 
men up to a higher consciousness of what 
they ought to be, have kept them mov- 
ing forward towards a higher ideal, must 
always hold the highest place in every 
well-organized and healthful condition of 
society. 

Other branches of knowledge must not 
be undervalued. They belong to our daily 
life, and no man can do without them. 
But the higher and broader culture which 
deals with matters of a more transcendent 
quality, and which lifts science and life it- 
self into a purer and larger companionship, 
should enter into the training of every 



Introduction. 13 

child, and go with him from the nursery 
to the kingdom of heaven. The infant 
mind is open to the holiest impressions, 
and the more advanced the stage of intel- 
lectual progress he has reached, the more 
quickening and uplifting are the concep- 
tions which he may find opening before 
him as he follows the guidance of the great 
poets of humanity. 

It is the purpose of these essays to indi- 
cate, by a few illustrious examples, some 
of the lessons and some of the methods by 
which this higher training may be carried 
on, and our higher consciousness be at 
once purified and enlarged. 




I. 

The Imagination in Religion, 



" Where there is no vision the people perish." 

Proverbs xxix. 18. 



THE IMAGINATION IN RELIGION. 




[|Y the imagination I understand the 
faculty of looking through outward, 
material forms into the unseen 
principles or laws by which they are gov- 
erned. What we see is but an intimation 
or token of what is. All art, all language, 
the world around us, the outward experi- 
ences of life, are but symbols, more or less 
imperfect, of something greater behind, 
which we can neither hear nor see, but 
which we recognize by this higher faculty. 
We may call it vision, faith, pure reason, 
imagination, or what we will. It is the 
faculty which makes things unseen real to 
us, and enables us to go beyond the reach 
of the senses, and take in the higher facts 
in man and in nature. 

By means of this faculty we go instinc- 



1 8 The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

tively from the visible fact to the unseen 
law by which it is governed. That which 
is seen becomes a token or representative 
of what is not seen. The mathematician 
recognizes in the smallest segment of a 
curve the properties which enable him to 
construct the whole. The naturalist sees 
in the fragment of a bone the properties 
which enable him to construct the entire 
animal. In the falling apple Newton rec- 
ognized a law by which the whole material 
universe is governed. 

Because there are laws everywhere, sub- 
jecting the visible universe to their influ- 
ence, and enforcing order through every 
department of nature, science becomes 
something more than an accumulation of 
incoherent materials. External, visible 
facts are arranged, harmonized, bound to- 
gether, by invisible relations and affinities. 
It is the office of this higher faculty to dis- 
cover and apply these invisible affinities or 
laws, and carry them out to their natural 
results. 



The Imagination in Religion. 19 

What we see is the symbol of something 
unseen, which the imagination or divining 
faculty recognizes. When we look upon a 
face certain hues and outlines are all that 
the eye can see. But behind that we, 
through the imagination, form a concep- 
tion of an intellectual, emotional, and spir- 
itual being, whom we learn to love and 
honor as our friend. He, the man, is never 
seen by us, and makes himself known to 
us through sensible form and sounds only 
because of this higher faculty by which we 
go in from the seen to the unseen. That 
which is dearest to us is not what we see, 
but what we divine, — using what we see 
as symbols or suggestions of what lies be- 
yond the reach of our senses. In looking 
at Raphael's Transfiguration or his Sis- 
tine Madonna, we see only a plane surface 
marked by different shades and colors. 
But while we look we are, through this 
higher faculty, brought into communication 
with the mind of the artist, and moved by 
his grand conceptions of spiritual power 



20 The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

and beauty. In like manner, amid the fair- 
est scenes of nature we see only outward 
forms and colors, but by the imagination 
we are taken into a conception or appre- 
hension of the unseen laws and presence 
and workings of the Infinite Mind. 

From the nature of things, science, with 
its material instruments, can never enable 
us to see Him who is a spirit. But it may 
bring us to the borders of that unknown 
realm where the healthful imagination de- 
mands his infinite presence as the neces- 
sary complement of what we see and are. 
In "the starry heavens above " and "the 
moral nature within " we find laws which 
demand a supreme, overruling, and crea- 
tive Mind to fill out these otherwise frag- 
mentary parts, and mould them into one 
harmonious and consistent whole. It is 
the office of the imagination to fill out the 
divine idea which lies hidden within visi- 
ble facts, waiting for some intelligent soul 
to follow their intimations onward to their 
perfect expression. In science the imagi- 



The Imagination in Religion. 21 

nation points to the deeper meaning which 
lies in facts already discovered, and which 
demands a step onward towards a broader 
generalization. In art, in poetry, the im- 
agination, feeling the limitations which our 
mortal condition imposes upon us, fills out, 
in its ideal creations, the thought of a di- 
viner beauty, a more exalted virtue, a truer 
joy, as the natural fulfilment of our pres- 
ent being. And everywhere this divining 
faculty looks up into the realm of religion 
as the necessary complement to satisfy 
the demands of our highest powers. The 
great poets and prophets of humanity, in 
all the ages, have been largely endowed 
with this gift. But rising upward through 
the seen to the unseen, in what is most sa- 
cred and divine, Jesus stands immeasurably 
above all others. Partial disclosures of di- 
vine truth, laws imperfectly unfolded to the 
human consciousness through the greatest 
seers who had come before him, are sepa- 
rated from extraneous and temporary ac- 
companiments, and filled out by his more 



22 The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

penetrating and comprehensive vision. 
And so broad, so deep, and so high is the 
world of truth and life into which he would 
lead us that common words and images, as 
symbols of his far-reaching thought, like 
the handwriting of God on the outward 
universe, often fail to impart to us their 
divinest meaning. Instead, therefore, of 
seeking to measure him by our inadequate 
standard, it becomes us to look up rever- 
ently to him, and strive more fully to un- 
derstand him. It is the office of the imag- 
ination from age to age to enter anew into 
his mind, and interpret his thought and 
life in the light of the highest moral and 
spiritual progress, and the most advanced 
ideas and intelligence. 

Where the imagination exists as a great 
natural endowment, and is educated with 
our other faculties in accordance with the 
laws of the intellect, it sees, as no other 
faculty does, the grander possibilities which 
are involved in the little facts around us, 
and which grow up through them into 



The Imagination in Religion. 23 

higher realities as their natural product. 
It divines the future in the present. It 
sees the plant in the seed. It recognizes 
in each specific act what is involved in it 
as its legitimate moral results. In the self- 
sacrificing precept, "He that loseth his 
life shall find it," it sees not only the pres- 
ent struggle and loss, or apparent defeat, 
but also, as already present and bound up 
in the same act, the future consequences 
growing out of it, — the soul endowed with 
a richer life, and rising triumphant in 
death. 

From what is visible and present, as 
shown in the imperfect specimens around 
us, the imagination divines the law which 
governs them, and follows it out to what 
these imperfectly developed parts must be 
when they have attained to their com- 
pleteness. A single example taken from 
Goethe's Autobiography will, perhaps, il- 
lustrate what I mean. While residing at 
Strasburg, he says, "I happened to be in 
a pretty large party at a country house, 



24 The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

from which there was a magnificent view 
of the front of the Minster and the tower 
that rises above it. ' It is a pity,' says 
some one, i that the whole is not finished, 
and that we have only one tower/ I re- 
plied, 'To me it seems quite as great a 
pity that this one tower is not completed ; 
for the four volutes end much too abruptly. 
Four light spires should be added to them, 
as well as a higher one in the middle 
where the clumsy cross now stands.' 

"As I made this declaration with my 
accustomed earnestness, a lively little man 
addressed me, and said, 'Who told you 
that ? ' ' The tower itself/ I answered. ' I 
have observed it so carefully, and have 
manifested so much attachment to it, that 
at last it determined to confess to me this 
open mystery/ ' It has not informed you 
untruly/ he responded. ' I have the best 
means of knowing, for I am the superin- 
tendent of the public edifices. In our ar- 
chives we still have the original design, 
which says precisely the same, and which 
I can show you/ " 



The Imagination in Religion. 25 

After he had carefully studied the build- 
ing, the imagination of the poet, like a 
finer sense, recognizing in its principal 
parts the law which should regulate the 
entire construction, and following that law 
out through the primary li^nes into their 
proper development, arrived at conclusions 
coinciding precisely with those adopted by 
the genius which had planned the entire 
structure. 

In the highest art, as in nature, there is 
nothing arbitrary. Everything must be in 
accordance with a divine idea or law. The 
great cathedral must fulfil the conditions 
of that idea, and grow out of it as naturally 
as the oak grows out of the acorn. And it 
is the office of the imagination to divine 
the law, and in accordance with it to con- 
struct the whole from any one of its parts. 

Thus we see that the imagination is no 
fitful or capricious agent, and that it is gov- 
erned as much as the eye or the reason by 
laws, and that the conclusions to which it 
leads us in its healthy action are as much 



26 The Great Poets as Religions Teachers. 

to be relied upon as those which we reach 
through the senses or the reason. Indeed, 
it is one of the 4*iost efficient agents which 
the reason can use in opening the way into 
new fields of knowledge. Especially is it 
the surest pioneer in the whole realm of 
moral and religious inquiry, where from 
the finite, the visible, and the temporal are 
to be evolved our highest conceptions of 
the infinite, the unseen, and the eternal. 

We need this divining faculty of the im- 
agination in order that we may see, in their 
fulness, the truths of our religion, which 
are dimly suggested in the world around 
us, and which, even in the New Testament, 
are often revealed in imperfect and frag- 
mentary forms of expression. The fulness 
of divine truth and life, that is, all the ful- 
ness of the divinity, as St. Paul terms it, 
has dwelt in but one man. Human lan- 
guage, from its very nature, could only par- 
tially set it forth. Even the Apostle could 
not take in, still less embody in words, all 
that is involved in it. "We know," he 



The Imagination in Religion. 27 

says, "only in part." As the Christian 
mind and consciousness, in the grander de- 
velopment of our moral and spiritual facul- 
ties, have been enlarged, the divine fulness 
which was in the mind and life of Jesus, 
speaking through him in words and acts, 
has been revealing itself more and more 
to the foremost spirits of the world from 
generation to generation. Men whose im- 
aginations have been consecrated and 
strengthened by holy living and thinking 
and a profound study of what he taught 
and was have been able to penetrate more 
deeply into the thought of Jesus, to lay 
hold on his instructions with a firmer 
grasp, and to set them forth more effec- 
tively to the reason and the heart. 

This deeper, broader insight into the 
mind of Jesus, this grander apprehension 
of what he said and was, are not to be at- 
tained by the logical understanding alone. 
That has its important and indispensable 
sphere and use. But it is circumscribed 
and hesitating in its approach towards new 



28 The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

truths or new developments of truth in the 
highest realms of thought. No syllogisms 
of logic can reason out the existence of 
God, or set before us his boundless attri- 
butes. After our keenest powers of analy- 
sis have taken us inward as far as they can 
towards the primary elements of matter, 
the imagination comes in to fill out what is 
wanting, and recognizes, as essential to the 
completeness of all that is yet known, an 
element finer than all material agencies, — 
the force by which they act, the life in 
which they live. 

Each separate leaf demands every organ 
that belongs to the plant. For without the 
whole each separate part would be incom- 
plete. So in the moral world, through our 
affections and our moral sensibilities, soci- 
ety is formed, friendships are cherished, 
laws enacted ; but the imagination, in its 
grander conceptions, sees how marred and 
incomplete all these things are as we see 
them here, and so follows them upward till 
they are filled out and find their complete 



The Imagination in Religion. 29 

development in him who is the highest law 
of our being, the life of our lives, the one 
satisfying object of our deepest and holiest 
love, the one eternal author and support of 
the moral order and harmony of the uni- 
verse. 

It is only through this faculty that we 
can understand the majestic imagery of the 
Bible, or see what its authors saw in their 
profound and sublime conceptions of divine 
truth. The logical faculty, invaluable in 
its place, is powerless here. It may exam- 
ine texts to see what they prove, and frame 
its systems of divinity, believing that it has 
thus embodied in a creed the whole of 
our religion. In this way it has often 
happened that the Scriptures have been 
robbed of everything in them that is most 
satisfying and precious to the soul. The 
want of a reverent religious imagination to 
aid the logical faculty and supplement its 
deficiencies has been the cause of unmeas- 
ured harm to the church. 

One of the most noteworthy features in 



$0 The Great Poets as Religions Teachers. 

the teachings of Jesus is the ideal or im- 
aginative form in which even his simplest 
instructions are given. A winged sentence 
comes to us, almost as slight in its out- 
ward structure as the thistle-down which 
bears its seed through the air a hundred 
miles, and yet it brings to us the most 
weighty and inspiring truths. As an illus- 
tration of this remark, I open the Gospels 
at random, and take the second sentence 
that meets my eye. "Are not five spar- 
rows sold for two farthings? and not one of 
them is forgotten before God." How nat- 
ural and unlabored the expression ! How 
easy it is to see and to remember the whole 
image that is brought before us ! And yet 
as we take it home to our hearts, and seek 
to follow it on with the imagination to- 
wards its full significance, it bears us up 
into the heavens, and introduces us, as no 
metaphysical expressions ever could, to the 
all-embracing, thoughtful, tender love of 
God. We see here that in the mind of 
Jesus the life of a sparrow requires, as its 



The Imagination in Religion. 31 

necessary complement, the being, the love, 
and the providential care of God. And 
here the whole subject lives before us. 
Reason with our short-sighted logic as we 
may about unchangeable law, as the only 
agency or method by which God acts in 
the universe, such reasoning does not sat- 
isfy us. This image of his love, this falling 
sparrow, watched over and cared for by 
him, appeals to a higher sentiment and a 
higher faculty both of the intellect and the 
soul. We choose not to enter the logical 
dungeon which has been hewn out for us 
in the rock of God's immutable nature. 
These words of Jesus carry us into a larger 
and truer sphere, and are more in accord- 
ance with the loving kindness and perfect 
freedom of the Eternal Mind. They tell 
of a grander, truer, freer life from God to 
man, and of man in God. 

I have spoken of the imagination as the 
divining faculty. In the little that lies 
within our reach, it discovers the law by 
which that little is governed, and in follow- 



$2 The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

ing which we may be carried on to grander 
conclusions. In the single bone it sees the 
whole animal and the conditions of water, 
land, and air essential to it. It enables 
us to look upon our present life, and the 
faculties of mind and heart which can be 
brought out through the experiences that 
are possible in this world, as but segments 
of a greater whole. From these incom- 
plete portions it divines the laws of our 
spiritual being, and sees, as already present, 
the higher opportunities and developments 
which are needed, in order that these laws 
shall reach the fulfilment of all that is im- 
plied in them. Thus it sees the future life 
involved as a necessity in the facts of our 
present existence. In its highest activity, 
as it shows itself in the mind of Jesus, it 
sees in each separate fact that which is 
needed for its complete development. To 
his mind no single flower or sparrow lives 
alone, but its otherwise helpless, isolated be- 
ing is imbedded in the divine thought, and 
is watched over, cared for, and tended by 
the all-embracing, loving providence of God. 



The Imagination in Religion. 33 

In the mind of Jesus the sense of the 
divine love and presence associates itself 
with every object and event, and thus fills 
out, with the fulness of the divine thought 
and love, what seems to us meagre and 
incomplete. There was in him a perfect 
blending of his mind and will with the 
mind and will of God. Conceptions of the 
eternal life and of the divine love and 
nearness, which it is difficult for us to gain 
even for a little while, went, it would seem, 
always with him in his daily thought, and 
were a part of his constant experience. 
As the great mathematician in the small 
arc of a curve, always and without effort, 
as by his personal consciousness, sees the 
whole, so Jesus, in each portion of our 
human life, sees the whole. He sees each 
fragmentary act in its completeness, in- 
volving as it does, to his open and pro- 
phetic vision, the presence of God in his 
laws, and the righteous retributions for 
good or evil which those laws are working 
out. The unseen spiritual world and the 
3 



}4 The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

unseen retributions which are bound up in 
every act and every disposition of mind 
reveal themselves to him in the act which 
is done, or the disposition of mind which 
is laid open before him. 

It is so everywhere in the Gospels. 
Seeing great principles of religious and 
moral truth involved in each small seg- 
ment of life, Jesus follows those principles 
on in their workings, without regard to the 
limitations of time and space which hide 
them from us. Our short-sighted percep- 
tions and logical inferences from them 
leave us perplexed and bewildered. He 
approaches us from a higher region. Ma- 
terial distinctions are dissolved. The lines 
which separate matter and spirit disappear. 
He takes us up into a higher realm, that 
in our deepest and greatest experiences 
we may be made partakers with him of the 
ceonian, that is, the eternal or spiritual, life, 
in which he lived. As we thus enter into 
his light our darkness vanishes away. The 
limitations of our physical existence seem 



The Imagination in Religion. 35 

hardly to be recognized by him. He sees 
in its completeness that which stands be- 
fore us apparently imperfect and incom- 
plete. We cannot so far put ourselves in 
his place as to comprehend his thought in 
all its fulness. Yet no other teachings 
come home to us so tenderly and closely, 
or so effectively adapt themselves to our 
highest and dearest wants. 

The office of the imagination in the dis- 
covery, the interpretation, and the applica- 
tion of religious thought and life is a very 
important and very difficult subject. But 
in this direction mainly we must advance, 
if we would attain to a deeper insight and 
a broader comprehension of the religion of 
Jesus, or so live and believe in him as to 
enter into his life with more vital and 
quickening experiences than have yet been 
embodied in his church or taken up into 
the Christian consciousness of his follow- 
ers. 

We must not hope to see through it all. 
When brought face to face with the spirit- 



$6 The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

ual and eternal we must expect something 
of mystery to overshadow it. We cannot 
see through these things or define that 
which is infinite. It is absurd to talk of a 
scientific study of religion in its grandest 
manifestations and influences. Its out- 
works, its human agencies and instru- 
ments, the history of its sacred books and 
forms, may be studied with scientific care 
and by scientific methods. But beyond all 
that we can comprehend, in the infinity and 
eternity which no human eye or thought 
can penetrate, are "the hidings of that 
power" which, awakening in us a diviner 
life, would lift us above this mortal sphere, 
and bring us into vital relations with a 
purer realm of being. It is because the 
Calvinists of a former age and the scien- 
tific unbelievers of our day have under- 
taken to bring everything within the grasp 
of their logical rules and definitions, re- 
jecting as unreal what they could not thus 
verify, that they have failed to recognize 
the deepest wants of our nature, the high- 



The Imagination in Religion. 37 

est thought of the Bible, and the dearest 
offices of Christ to the soul. 

The great poets of humanity understand 
better the way of dealing with, the grand- 
est problems of life, and furnish better 
examples for us to follow in the highest 
of all studies than can be found with logi- 
cians and scientists, great and beneficent 
as they are in their own sphere. I have 
endeavored to give some intimation of this 
better method by which we may be led 
into a truer liberty and a more life-giving 
satisfaction in our interpretation of the 
mind and the will of God. In this way we 
may begin, in our Christian studies, to em- 
ploy the imagination as an efficient agent 
in helping us upward, with increasing love 
and reverence, into ever higher, broader, 
and more inspiring fields of vision. 



II. 

The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 



" Men endowed with highest gifts, 
The vision, and the faculty divine." 

Wordsworth. 



THE GREAT POETS AS RELIGIOUS 
TEACHERS. 




T is the office of the imagination to 
fill out in its completeness that 
which reveals itself to us in actual 
life only in mutilated or imperfect exam- 
ples. The philosopher or anatomist takes 
an ideal man as the subject of his investi- 
gations, filling out what might be wanting 
in any specific example. The great math- 
ematician deals entirely with ideal forms. 
This divining faculty, seeing what others 
do not see, "outrunning the deductions of 
logic," and recognizing in isolated facts 
the law by which they and all similar facts 
are governed, is the distinguishing quality 
of the great minds who from age to age 
have led the human race onward by new 
revelations of truth in science, in govern- 



42 The Great Poets as Religious Teachers, 

ment, and in those complicated but es- 
sential qualities of thought and character 
which enter as vital elements into our 
social condition and progress. 

This is preeminently true of every great 
poet who, under fictitious forms and by 
ideal examples, reveals the most substan- 
tial of all realities. He deals with ideal 
men and women, transforming himself 
through the imagination into widely differ- 
ent types of humanity, and showing to us 
the wants, the faculties, and the capabili- 
ties of our nature as they are brought out 
under an infinite variety of circumstances. 
Fictitious forms stand for underlying real- 
ities. Behind the fact which the poet as- 
sumes for the time he sees the law which 
it represents, and, following it on through 
its natural and inevitable workings, he 
brings before us in its most affecting fea- 
tures the whole attendant history. The per- 
sonages by whom the problem is worked 
out, like the unknown quantity in an alge- 
braic formula, may be purely fictitious, but 



The Great Poets as Religions Teachers. 43 

in every great poetic creation they are 
governed by the laws of their being. Rec- 
ognizing and obeying those laws, the poet 
reveals to us their workings in living ex- 
amples of men and women moved by the 
passions, hopes, enthusiasms, beliefs, and 
fears which belong to such and such types 
of humanity under those assumed condi- 
tions. The greatest poet is he who takes 
the grandest characters through the most 
varied and trying experiences, and fills out 
for us, naturally and truly, what should be 
their secret thoughts and emotions. There 
is no other process by which the wants and 
capabilities of our nature and the great 
laws of life can be so vividly and effec- 
tively brought before us. 

Hence it is that in all ages the imagina- 
tion has suggested the most impressive and 
authoritative method of teaching the high- 
est ethical and spiritual truths. Homer and 
^Eschylus and Sophocles were the most 
revered teachers in Greece ; and among 
the accomplished scholars of our day, there 



44 The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

are not wanting earnest Christian believ- 
ers who find in them tokens and examples 
of an inspiration not unlike that of the He- 
brew prophets. If Plato rose above other 
philosophers in his influence on the highest 
thought of the world and in the place he 
has held in its reverence, it is because his 
imagination lifted him above his "dialec- 
tics," and caused him to present his grand- 
est ideas under forms which belong more 
to the poet than to the philosopher. 

It may, therefore, be well for us to see 
how the most momentous of all subjects, 
connecting us with God and the unseen 
laws of his kingdom, are treated by a few 
of the greatest poets. For this reason I 
have selected three who are generally re- 
garded as holding the highest place among 
the poets of modern times, while they also 
stand entirely apart from one another in 
their leading characteristics as writers and 
as men. 



III. 

Dante. 



" Ah ! from what agonies of heart and brain, 
What exultations trampling on despair, 
What tenderness, what tears, what hate of wrong, 
What passionate outcry of a soul in pain, 
Uprose this poem of the earth and air, 
This mediaeval miracle of song." 

" I lift mine eyes, and all the windows blaze 

With forms of saints and holy men who died, 
Here martyred and hereafter glorified; 
And the great Rose upon its leaves displays 
Christ's triumph, and the angelic roundelays, 
With splendor upon splendor multiplied; 
And Beatrice again at Dante's side 
No more rebukes, but smiles her words of praise. ,, 

Longfellow. 



Readers who would study the Divina Commedia with- 
out a knowledge of the Italian language will find Mr. 
Longfellow's translation, with the accompanying notes, 
an indispensable guide and help. I know of no case in 
which so literal an interpretation conveys the author's 
meaning with such extraordinary felicity and skill. 
For this reason I have taken the liberty to use it almost 
entirely in my quotations. Dr. Parsons's translation, as 
far as it is completed, gives in its rhythmical movement 
a better idea of the tone and spirit of the poem than 
any other translation that I know of. James Russell 
Lowell's article on Dante is the grandest paper of the 
kind that I have ever read, and may be placed with 
Longfellow's Sonnets on the Commedia* 



DANTE. 




ANTE'S " Divina Commedia " is, 
I suppose, taking it all in all, 
the greatest single product of hu- 
man genius. Its subject is substantially 
this : Man, in his first opening affections, 
may be impressed with love and reverence 
for what is divine. There comes a time, 
however, when, amid other and low r er at- 
tractions, this first love loses its hold upon 
him, and he is led astray. But he is never 
quite satisfied. In his difficulties and aber- 
rations, the thought of what he has lost 
comes over him with a sense of awe and 
contrition. Then the divine Truth, whose 
beauty so entranced him once, presenting 
itself to him with startling authority, leads 
him to look into his own heart and life, and 
into the unseen world in which his destiny 



48 The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

is to be fulfilled. So, step by step, through 
the dread of punishment, through tears of 
penitence, and by renewed purity of heart 
and life, he is prepared to see again and to 
embrace the Truth which he -had neglected. 
It rebukes him at first. Gradually, as he 
gives himself more entirely to it, he rises 
upward, and, with every new advance in his 
mental and moral condition, he is able to 
look more clearly into it, and to see in it a 
new attractiveness and power. Leaving 
other guides behind, he follows it onward 
and upward till it reveals itself to him in 
the fulness of its divine beauty and splen- 
dor. 

Here, in naked prose, is the subject, if 
not the substance, of Dante's poem. The 
same thing had been preached in thousands 
of Christian pulpits. It had furnished the 
ground-work of all serious thinking and 
teaching from the time of the Apostles. 
Around it had gathered the commonplaces 
of religion and morals, till the life that 
was in it once had apparently been extin- 



Dante. 49 

guished. How then could it be made the 
central thought of the greatest poem of all 
the ages ? 

Dante, cast out of his native city, wan- 
dering he knew not whither, without a 
home and with no apparent means of sup- 
port, felt, with the intensity of his keenly 
sensitive and impassioned nature, how bit- 
terly salt is the bread eaten by an exile at 
another's table, and how wearisome the 
stairs he had to ascend in other men's 
houses. Yet in all his homesickness and 
desolation his great mind lived in an ideal 
world. He saw what was in man. Under 
outward circumstances of prosperity and 
adversity alike he recognizes the pres- 
ence of a free and responsible being. In 
every act, whether for good or evil, he sees 
the workings of a divine law, and in the 
workings of that law he finds the condi- 
tions which are required by his fine instinct 
of justice and mercy as the necessary com- 
plement to these visible lives, and without 
which everything here would exist only in 

4 



$o The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

a state of suspended or mutilated develop- 
ment. Through these ideal realms in which 
the laws of our moral being are working 
out their natural and necessary results, his 
mind ranges as amid the only essential 
realities. When a great crime is commit- 
ted, he sees at once the consequences that 
must follow, and in his secret thought as- 
signs to the man who commits it his fitting 
place in hell, — the hell in which the soul 
imprisons itself by the commission of such 
a crime. So, to his mind, every sigh of 
penitence, every virtuous act, every ad- 
vance of the soul upward through higher 
thoughts and nobler deeds, reveals to his 
prophetic imagination a sphere of life in 
which alone men and women really live. 
Beyond what meets the eye, therefore, he 
finds, actually present to his thought, ideal, 
but none the less real, realms of pain and 
contrition, in which the perpetrators of 
wrong may have their fitting punishment, 
or in which those whose sins had left them 
capable of penitence and purification may, 



Dante. 5/ 

through years or ages of appropriate chas- 
tisement and grief, rise above their sins, 
and finally have every stain of guilt ef- 
faced. But most of all did he rejoice to 
follow men in their ascent upward to the 
world where he should find again the van- 
ished dream of an ideal truth and beauty, 
and see, in a more transcendent form, 
what had dawned upon him in his child- 
hood as an object of unspeakable love and 
reverence. In all his wanderings, intensi- 
fied by his sufferings, these unseen worlds 
and agents were present with him, feeding 
his hungry heart with meat which others 
knew not of, and so sweetening the bitter- 
ness of his exile, and giving him some fore- 
taste of "the peace" he craved. 

Dante is himself so identified with his 
poetry that we can hardly understand it 
without knowing something of his per- 
sonal history. When but a child he met 
a maiden, younger than himself, who made 
such an impression upon him that from 
that hour she was to him the impersona- 



52 The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

tion of all that is most beautiful and at- 
tractive. " When she was near any one," 
Dante says in his "Vita Nuova," "such 
modesty took possession of his heart that he 
did not dare to raise his eyes or to return 
her salutation. She, crowned and clothed 
with humility, took her way, displaying no 
pride in that which she saw and heard. 
Many, when she had passed, said, ' This is 
not a woman ; rather is she one of the most 
beautiful angels of heaven.' " "When at 
length," as he says, " the Lord God of 
justice called away my most gracious lady 
unto himself," under the pressure of grief 
which followed, he wrote a few small 
poems concerning her. After this, he 
writes, "It was given unto me to behold 
a very wonderful vision, wherein I saw 
things which determined me that I would 
say nothing further of this most blessed 
one, until such time as I could discourse 
more worthily concerning her. And to 
this end I labor all I can, as she well 
knoweth. Wherefore, if it be his pleasure, 



Dante. . 5^ 

through whom is the life of all things, that 
my life continue with me a few years, it 
is my hope that I shall yet write concern- 
ing her what hath not before been written 
of any woman." 

Gradually, as his great work opens to 
him its wonderful revelations, she becomes 
transfigured before him, till "this mortal 
has put on immortality/' and she is no 
longer an earthly but a heavenly being, 
the impersonation of divine truth and 
beauty, animated and inspired by divine 
love. While he thus thinks of her as hav- 
ing her seat in the highest heavens, her 
present glory is thrown back on her early 
years, and the young maiden as well as 
the maturer woman, whom he once knew 
as the object of his purest love and rev- 
erence, is, by the transforming power of 
his imagination, lifted up into the same 
exalted sphere. The thought of her still 
awakens in him throbs of tender emotion, 
when he calls to mind their early love for 
one another, and the influence for good 



54 The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

which she then exercised over him. She 
is no passionless abstraction standing aloft 
in the cold empyrean heights > far above all 
human sympathies. Her features of un- 
spotted truthfulness and beauty are suf- 
fused with the roseate coloring of wo- 
manly love and tenderness. Though di- 
vine she is also human. When first she 
appears in the poem, " her eyes were 
brighter than the star," and she began to 
speak " gentle and low with voice angel- 
ical." But after she had expressed her 
deep anxiety for Dante, " a friend of 
mine," she said, "and not a friend of for- 
tune," her shining eyes now filled with 
tears, " weeping she turned away." And 
when in the highest heavens it was given 
him to see her for the last time in his 
poetic vision, 

" She, so far away, 
Smiled, as it seemed, and looked once more at me, 
Then Unto the eternal fountain turned." 

Thus it is with her. If she is the imper- 
sonation of divine truth, she also sheds 
tears of human compassion. She has for 



Dante. 55 

Dante not merely the stern qualities of a 
heavenly monitor and guide, but also the 
tenderness and partiality which had grown 
out of their personal relations and their 
personal interest in one another. 

Here is Dante's Beatrice, the loftiest, 
the purest, the most beautiful and inspir- 
ing conception of woman in the literature 
of the world. And she is the presiding 
genius of the " Divina Commedia. ,, 

The poet represents himself as having 
fallen away from his sublime devotion to 
her after her death, and as being infatu- 
ated and misled by other passions and in 
immediate danger of more fatal results, 
wandering hopelessly from the true path, 
when Beatrice, from her heavenly exalta- 
tion, seeing that nothing else can save 
him, devises a way by which he may yet 
be rescued from destruction. He is to 
be taken through the abodes of departed 
souls. In those heretofore unseen realms, 
he sees in its more extended development 
what is in man, — what infinite capabilities 



56 The Great Poets as Religions Teachers. 

for good or evil, for weal or woe, as re- 
vealed to him in the loss and torments 
which each separate type of sin brings 
with it or drags after it as its natural con- 
sequences ; in the slow workings and fear- 
ful pangs of remorse by which the soul 
painfully makes its way upward through 
penitential inflictions and sorrows till the 
stains of sin are all effaced ; and in the 
different degrees and kinds of joy through 
which the different classes of the re- 
deemed may rise, rank above rank, as the 
poet rises from world to world, till the 
highest souls are united as in one vast 
rose, on which the dews and sunlight of 
God's love falls, and into which his angels 
and archangels are perpetually coming, to 
breathe into the souls of the blessed new 
effluences of divine love and peace. 

It is not possible, in any condensed state- 
ment or abbreviated sketch, to give an 
idea of the "Divina Commedia." In it all 
that is most vitally true in the thoughts, 
all that is most quickening in the experi- 



Dante. $j 

ences, all that is most inspiring in the 
conceptions, aspirations, and prayers of 
the greatest thinkers, saints, and martyrs 
who had gone before him, may be found 
transfigured by the poet's creative or sug- 
gestive imagination. His subject, he says, 
is man. Wherever he takes us, we find 
ourselves in the midst of human sympa- 
thies and emotions. Even in the Inferno, 
amid appalling images of anguish, hatred, 
and despair, there is something to relieve 
the otherwise intolerable oppression of 
darkness and terror. The hurricane that 
drives poor Francesca da Rimini and the 
guilty partner of her love, hurling them 
onward, or whirling them round and round 
forever in its remorseless fury, suspends 
its motion a little while, when Dante calls 
to them : — 

'"O ye weary souls, 
Come speak to us, if no one interdicts it.' 
As turtle-doves, called onward by desire, 
With open and steady wings to the sweet nest 
Fly through the air by their volition borne, 
So came they from the land where Dido is, 
Approaching us athwart the air malign, 
So strong was the affectionate appeal. " 



5<? The Great Poets as Religions Teachers. 
She tells her tale of love and grief, 

11 And all the while one spirit uttered this, 
The other one did weep so, that for pity, 
I swooned away as if I had been dying, 
And fell, even as a dead body falls." x 

This is but one of many examples by 
which some glow of human tenderness is 
let into those joyless regions. Farinata 
degli Uberti, shut up in his intensely 
heated coffin, tells Dante that the conduct 
of his sinful associates who are still on 
the earth — 

" Torments him more than doth his bed." 

And while he is speaking, a neighbor of 
his, the father of one of Dante's most inti- 
mate friends, recognizing his voice, lifts his 
head above the fiery sarcophagus in which 
he was confined and cries out, weeping: — 

" Where is my son ? and why is he not with thee ? " 

Then, misunderstanding Dante, and 
wrongly inferring from a single word that 
his son is dead, he exclaims : — 

u Is he not still alive? 
Does not the sweet light strike upon his eyes? 
1 Inferno, x. 



Dante. 59 

And without waiting to hear anything fur- 
ther, in sullen and speechless anguish he 
drops back again into his torturing bed. 
Down almost in the lowest depths of 
hell, the Count Ugolino suspends for a 
few moments his work of fierce and ghastly 
vengeance, to tell the most heart-breaking 
of all pathetic tales, how by the treachery 
of the Archbishop Ruggieri, who is with 
him in this place of torment, he and his 
four children had been shut up and starved 
to death : — 

11 I heard the locking up under the door 

Of the horrible tower ; whereat without a word 

I gazed into the faces of my sons. 

I wept not, I within so turned to stone ; 

They wept ; and darling little Anselm mine 

Said : ' Thou dost gaze so, father, what doth ail thee ? ' 
Still not a tear I shed, nor answer made 

All of that day, nor yet the night thereafter 

Until another sun rose on the world." 

u When we had come unto the fourth day, Gaddo 
Threw himself down outstretched before my feet, 
Saying : * My father, why dost thou not help me ? ' 
And there he died ; and, as thou seest me, 
I saw the three fall one by one, between 
The fifth day and the sixth." * 

1 Iitferno^ xxxiii. 



60 The Great Poets as Religions Teachers. 

These expressions of a father's love and 
grief come from one who because of the 
enormity of his sins is placed in one of the 
lowest circles, and amid the fiercest tor- 
ments, of hell. In this very neighborhood 
one of the most abandoned of sinners tes- 
tifies that in relating what he saw in hell 
Dante does not confine himself to the ret- 
ribution of a future world. The friar Al- 
berigo says to him : — 

'* Know that the soul, that moment she betrays, 
As I did, yields her body to a fiend 
Who after moves and governs it at will, 
Till all its time be sounded : headlong she 
Falls to this cistern." 

In proof of this he points to Branca 
d' Oria, who lies near. But Dante sharply 
replies : — 

" I think thou dost deceive me, 
For Branca d' Oria is not dead as yet, 
And eats, and drinks, and puts on clothes." 

But Branca d' Oria, the moment he com- 
mitted the double crime of treachery and 
murder, had been hurried down into the 
lowest hell, and left a devil in his stead to 



Dante. . 61 

inhabit his body in Genoa. By such im- 
ages would Dante indicate the terrible and 
immediate consequences of sin. Human 
affections, human passions, the tenderness 
of grief, the malignity of hate, go with the 
sinful everywhere through that dismal 
abode, creating the sorrows which are 
there endured and bewailed. 

Dante's Inferno is no foreign structure 
arbitrarily erected. It rather symbolizes 
conditions of existence projected from the 
soul, and formed, like the shell around the 
nautilus, out of natural secretions from its 
own inmost life. Its retributions grow 
out of the moral constitution of man, and 
hold an indestructible place in the order 
of the moral universe. On the very heart 
of our humanity, as a warning and a safe- 
guard to the soul, are inscribed the ter- 
rible words which Dante saw written in 
dingy colors over the gate of hell : — 

11 Justice incited my sublime Creator : 
To rear me was the task of power divine, 
Supremest wisdom and primeval love." * 
1 hiferno, iii. 



62 The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

This same eternal law of retribution, 
which allows no hope to the sinful while 
they continue in their sin, goes hopefully 
upward with the soul through the pangs of 
purgatory, and fulfils its commission in the 
region of supreme blessedness. I suppose 
that fifty persons read portions of the " In- 
ferno," and get from that their idea of 
Dante, where there is one who follows 
him up the toilsome ascent of the moun- 
tain of purification, and thence upward 
still, till he has attained to the loftiest vis- 
ion of what may be possible to man aided 
by all the ministries, human and divine, 
which God has ordained for his moral and 
spiritual advancement. In the Purgatorio, 
there are sufferings hardly less excruciat- 
ing than those which the poet has left 
behind. But hope, which is shut out 
forever from the Inferno, is permitted to 
enter here, and to throw something of its 
gracious light around those who, through 
ages upon ages of pain and contrition, 
are expiating and expunging their sins. 



Dante. 63 

Here as in the Inferno are human hearts. 
Here are greetings of friends, touches of 
human feeling, a tender interest in the 
world where they once lived, which relieve 
the dreary uniformity of unremitting suf- 
fering. All are anxious for the prayers of 
friends who are still living on the earth. 
The poet meets Nino, " a courteous judge" 
whom he once knew, and who now says, 
referring to his daughter, and to his wife 
who had married again and unhappily : — 

11 Tell my Giovanna that she pray for me, 
Where answer to the innocent is made. 

I do not think her mother loves me more, 
Since she has laid aside her wimple white, 
Which she, unhappy, needs must wish again. 

Through her full easily is comprehended 
How long in woman lasts the fire of love, 
If eye or touch do not relight it often." 1 

In the circle assigned to those who are 
expiating the sin of avarice, Dante meets 
Pope Adrian V., lying with his face 
downward under an overpowering bur- 
den, bound and imprisoned by the feet and 
hands, and saying, " No more bitter pain 

1 Purg. viii. 71. 



64 The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

the mountain hath." Of all the thousands 
who courted and flattered him while he 
lived in his great office, there are none now 
to remember him in their prayers. Only 
one person he recalls as truly his friend : — 

" Oh earth I have a grandchild named Alagia, 
Good in herself, unless indeed our house 
Malevolent may make her by example, 
And she alone remains to me on earth." l 

The poem is everywhere relieved by 
sweet touches of nature such as these, and 
by passages of rare beauty as well as of 
profound wisdom, which find their way to 
the heart like some subtle purifying and 
reviving essence. Unexpectedly on one 
occasion he feels a sudden trembling of 
the mountain, while from all around him 
there arises the sacred song, " Gloria in 
Excelsis." He is anxious to know the 
cause : — 

"And lo ! in the same manner as Luke vvriteth 

That Jesus appeared to two upon the way, 

From the sepulchral cave already risen, 

A shade appeared to us, and came behind lis 

Down gazing on the prostrate multitude." 3 

1 Purg. xx. 142. , 2 Purg. xx. 167. 



Dante. 65 

This is Statius, the poet, who tells them 
that he himself, who had been lying there 
five hundred years and more, had just now 
" felt a free volition for a better seat," and 
so was ready to leave these sufferings be- 
hind and rise into the courts above. 

M Therefore thou heard'st the earthquake, and the pious 
Spirits along the mountain rendering praise 
Unto the Lord." 

Here we see it is by no arbitrary external 
act, but through a change in the soul itself, 
a consciousness of purity regained, and 
with it " a free volition for a better seat," 
that it rises above these painful trials. 

" It trembles here, whenever any soul 

Feels itself pure, so that it soars, or moves 
To mount aloft, and such a cry attends it." 

Is it not a beautiful conception, that of the 
mountain trembling with joy, and the mul- 
titudes of sorrowing souls breaking forth 
into a song of gladness because one of 
their number, after ages of suffering, is 
now freed from the intolerable burden that 
still weighs them down ? 
5 



66 The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

It is, I think, more difficult for us to en- 
ter heartily into the poet's conceptions of 
Purgatory, and to feel the moral force and 
beauty of his teachings there, than to go 
with him in any other part of his great 
work. With the Reformation, Purgatory 
was abolished by the Protestant churches, 
and no longer came in to make a part of 
their Christian consciousness. Not the 
doctrine itself, but the monstrous abuses 
connected with it by a corrupt and merce- 
nary priesthood who gloated over its pe- 
cuniary gains, led to this result. Between 
an eternal hell and heaven there was left 
no intermediate condition by which sinners 
might pass from one to the other. But 
within the last century, in the growth of 
the more humane sentiments of our relig- 
ion and the more benignant ideas of justice 
suggested by them, there has been an in- 
creasing tendency towards the belief that, 
in the counsels of infinite power and wis- 
dom, justice, not less than love, demands 
that there should be some proportion be- 



Dante. 67 

tween the sin and the punishment ; and 
that while a penalty for sin must be paid 
to uphold the law of righteousness, yet the 
great purpose of pain as connected with 
transgression is a remedial one, and that 
the effect of pain as a remedial agent must 
not be limited to this world. Under these 
influences, Christians of all denominations, 
who allow themselves to think and to fol- 
low freely the teachings of Jesus in their 
humane and beneficent bearings, have been 
relenting from their old severity and ex- 
tending the sphere of our moral probation 
beyond the limits of this life. We are 
thus practically, though in a less definite 
and more purely spiritual form, restoring 
Dante's idea, and making his intermediate 
world more comprehensive, it may be, than 
both the others, at least in the early experi- 
ences of those who have just been passing 
out of this earthly life. From this point 
of view, a great deal may be learned by a 
careful study of the " Purgatorio." 

Dante himself was not allowed to enter 



68 The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

Purgatory till every mark left on his coun- 
tenance by the malignant atmosphere of 
Hell had been washed off, and he had 
girded himself with the reed of humility. 
After that, he was able to walk upward 
from circle to circle with a lighter step, 
only as one sin after another had been ef- 
faced from his heart. Near the summit of 
the mountain, he is approaching the border 
of the terrestrial paradise. A fierce flame 
is blazing before him. He shrinks from 
entering it, but is told that only when he 
has submitted to its searching fires, so that 
all the grosser elements of his nature are 
refined away, can he be permitted to see 
Beatrice. Thus excited and drawn onward 
by his intense desire to see her, he enters 
within the flame, and while standing in it 
he would gladly have leaped into molten 
glass to refresh himself : — 

" So without measure was the burning there." 1 

After this he is allowed to enter the earthly 
paradise. 

1 Purg. xxvii. 



Dante. 6g 

The six closing cantos of the " Purgato- 
rio," in which Beatrice first appears person- 
ally before us, have a profound moral sig- 
nificance, and contain passages of surpass- 
ing moral elevation and spiritual beauty. It 
is only when we approach them, as Dante 
did, from the Inferno and the hardly less 
torturing experiences of Purgatory, and 
then in our best moments give ourselves 
entirely to them, that we can catch more 
than distant glimpses of their affecting and 
profound significance. 

From the beginning of his painful pil- 
grimage, Dante has been looking forward 
to this meeting with intense longings. 
Now he is left to himself by Virgil, who 
can take him no farther. Forms of more 
than earthly sweetness and splendor greet 
him on every side and lead him on to new 
visions of divine benignity and truth. Be- 
fore him he sees an hundred angels spring 
on a chariot divine, singing their song of 
welcome, and " scattering like the Spring- 
time roses all around. " 



jo The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

li Underneath a falling cloud of flowers, 
Which from those hands angelical rained 

Into the chariot and around in showers, 
Wreathed over a white veil, with olive crown, 

Appeared a woman in a mantle green, 
And living flame the color of her gown. 

"Although the veil which from her forehead fell, 
Girt by that frondage of Minerva's tree, 

Suffered me not to see her features well, 
Queenly she looked, and yet upbraided me." 1 

The angels interpose in his behalf, and 
ask, " Lady, why chide him so ? " She, 
describing his great natural endowments, 
and the gifts and opportunities bestowed 
upon him by divine grace, adds severely, 
in words intended for him, but addressed 
to those around her : 

" I with my beauty held him for a space, 
And with my young eyes kept his footsteps firm 

Mine own to follow in the ways of grace. 
Soon as the threshold of its second term 

My life had reached, and I my being changed, 
Earthly for heavenly — this man wholly gave 

Himself to other loves from mine estranged. 
And when from flesh ascending through the grave 

To spirit, my grace and goodness were increased, 
I was less dear, less lovely in his eyes." 

" Say," she continues, turning to Dante, — 

1 Dr. Parsons's Translation, xxx. 



Dante. 71 

" say, say if this be true." And when he, 
confused and overcome, confesses that it 
is so, she turns to him again and asks how 
he could have been so misled. He an- 
swers, weeping : — 

"The things that present were 
With their false pleasure turned aside my steps, 
Soon as your countenance concealed itself." 

To this she replies : — 

" That thou mayest feel a greater shame 
For thy transgression, and another time, 
Hearing the Sirens, thou mayest be more strong, 

Cast down the seed of weeping, and attend ; 
So shalt thou hear how in an opposite way 
My buried flesh should have directed thee. 

Never to thee presented art or nature 
Pleasure so great as the fair limbs wherein 
I was enclosed which scattered are in earth. 

And if the highest pleasure thus did fail thee 
By reason of my death, what mortal thing 
Should then have drawn thee unto its desire? 

Thou oughtest verily at the first shaft 
Of things fallacious to have risen up 
To follow me, who was no longer such." 

Here self-conviction stung Dante to the 
heart so sharply that he fell powerless to 
the ground. The other ladies again inter- 
posed in his behalf : — 



J 2 The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

iC * Turn, Beatrice, O turn thy holy eyes,* 

Such was their song, 'unto thy faithful one, 
Who has, to see thee, ta ? en so many steps. 
In grace do us the grace that thou unveil 
Thy face to him, so that he may discern 
The second beauty which thou dost conceal.' " 

She grants their request, and Dante, re- 
ferring to what he then saw, exclaims : — 

" O splendor of the living light eternal ! 

Who underneath the shadow of Parnassus 
Hath grown so pale, or drunk so at its cistern, 

He would not seem to have his mind encumbered, 
Striving to paint thee as thou didst appear, 
Where the harmonious heaven o'ershadowed thee, 

When in the open air thou didst unveil ? " 

Virgil, who represents the human un- 
derstanding, can no longer guide Dante 
upward, and therefore Beatrice, or Divine 
Truth, takes him in charge, and as they 
rise from sphere to sphere, and he by his 
advanced intelligence and virtue is able 
to bear it, she with an infinite sweetness 
smiles upon him, and reveals to him more 
and more of her celestial beauty. At the 
lowest stage of heavenly joy, she turns 
towards him, "blithe as beautiful,'' and 
says : — 



Dante. y^ 

11 ' Fix gratefully thy mind 
On God, who unto the first star has brought us.' 

It seemed to me a cloud encompassed us, 
Luminous, dense, consolidate and bright 
As adamant on which the sun is striking. 

Into itself did the eternal pearl receive us." 

Here he feels the desire enkindled in 



him, — 

" That essence to behold, wherein is seen 
How God and our own nature were united." 

He finds here, in the lowest of the heav- 
enly spheres, his wife's sister, Picarda, 
and asks : — 

M ' Tell me, ye who in this place are happy, 
Are you desirous of a higher place, 
To see more or to make yourselves more friends?' 

First with those other shades she smiled a little ; 
Thereafter answered me so full of gladness, 
She seemed to burn in the first fire of love. 
* Brother, our will is quieted by virtue 
Of charity, that makes us wish alone 
For what we have, nor gives us thirst for more. 

Nay, 't is essential to this blest existence 
To keep itself within the will divine, 
Whereby our very wishes are made one ; 

So that as we are station above station 
Throughout this realm, to all the realm 'tis pleasing, 
As to the King, who makes his will our will. 

And his will is our peace ; this is the sea 
To which is moving onward whatsoever 
It doth create, and all that nature makes.' " 



74 The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

"Then it was clear to me how everywhere 
In heaven is paradise, altho' the grace 
Of good Supreme there rain not in one measure." 

From this blessed spirit Dante turns 
to Beatrice, — 

" But she such lightnings flashed into mine eyes, 

That at the first my sight endured it not; 
And this in questioning more backward made me." 

This may serve as a sample of the poet's 
method of taking us up into one after an- 
other of the heavenly spheres. There are 
passages all along of no great interest to 
us, especially where questions of physical 
science are discussed. But we are con- 
cerned only with the religious character of 
the work. And that is brought vividly 
before us, as we advance constantly into 
higher realms of thought and experience, 
and listen to the profound and lofty dis- 
coursing of those who had been, in their 
different spheres, the great examples and 
lights of the world. In the sun, or the 
fourth heaven, where dwell Thomas Aqui- 
nas, and the great theologians and fathers 
of the church, these words are heard:-— 



Dante. 75 

" Whoso lamenteth him that here we die 

That we may live above, hath never there 
Seen the refreshment of the eternal rain. 
... In the lustre most divine of all 
The lesser ring, I heard a modest voice, 
Such as perhaps the angel's was to Mary, 

Answer : * As long as the festivity 

Of Paradise shall be, so long our love 
Shall radiate round about us such a vesture. 

Its brightness is proportioned to the ardor, 
The ardor to the vision ; and the vision 
Equals what grace it has above its worth.' " 

It is not always easy to understand what 
is said by these sublime teachers on the 
greatest of all themes. Theology, as rep- 
resented in the person of Beatrice, and as 
taught in the heavens by those who had 
most truly comprehended and illustrated 
its meaning, becomes, as we ascend, less 
an intellectual statement, and more and 
more a quickening spirit, solving, as noth- 
ing else can, the great and terrible prob- 
lems of life. The stern voice of the prophet 
is heard even in heaven denouncing, as the 
old Jewish prophets had done, the ava- 
rice, the profligacy, and wickedness of the 
world, and more especially the corruptions 



j6 The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

which had crept into the church, even into 
its high places. But above all things, vis- 
ions are granted of victory over sin and 
death. 

" I saw the heaven wax more and more resplendent." 

And Beatrice exclaimed : — 

" ' Behold the hosts 
Of Christ's triumphal march, and all the fruit 
Harvested by the rolling of these spheres.' 
It seemed her face were all aflame, 
And eyes she had so full of ecstasy 
That I must needs pass on without describing." 

"There," she said, — 

" There are the wisdom and the omnipotence 
That ope'd the thoroughfares 'twixt heaven and earth, 
For which there erst had been so long a yearning. " 

In a yet higher sphere, a still brighter 
vision is vouchsafed to him, which caused 
him to exclaim : — 

" O splendor of God ! by means of which I saw 
The lofty triumph of the realm veracious, 
Give me the power to say how it I saw ! 

There is a light above, which visible 
Makes the Creator unto every creature 
Who only in beholding him has peace, 

And it expands itself in circular form 
To such extent, that its circumference 
Would be too large a girdle for the sun. 

In fashion then as of a snow-white rose 



Dante. yy 



Displayed itself to me the saintly host, 

Whom Christ in his own blood had made his bride. 

But the other host, that flying sees and sings 
The glory of Him who doth enamour it, 
And the goodness that created it so noble, 

Even as a swarm of bees, that sinks in flowers 
One moment, and the next returns again 
To where its labor is to sweetness turned, 

Sank into the great flower, that is adorned 
With leaves so many, and thence reascended 
To where its love abideth evermore. 

Faces I saw of charity persuasive, 
Embellished by His light and their own smile, 
And attitudes adorned with every grace." 

From this scene of wonder and delight, 
Dante turned to question Beatrice. But 
she had been called upward to take 

" Far, far above, her seat 
Upon the throne her merits have assigned her." 

" I lifted up mine eyes 
And saw her, as she made herself a crown 
Reflecting from herself the eternal rays. 

* O lady, thou in whom my hope is strong, 
And who for my salvation didst endure 
In hell to leave the imprint of thy feet, 
Of whatsoever things I have beheld, 
As coming from thy power and from thy goodness, 
I recognize the virtue and the grace. 

Thou from a slave hast brought me unto freedom, 
By all those ways, by all the expedients, 
Whereby thou hadst the power of doing it. 

Preserve towards me thy magnificence, 



?8 The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

So that this soul of mine which thou hast healed, 
Pleasing to thee be loosened from the body.' 
Thus I implored; and she, so far away, 

Smiled, as it seemed, and looked once more at me, 
Then unto the eternal fountain turned." 

These are but samples from the Paradiso 
to illustrate its spirit and its character. 
But only as we study them, each in its fit- 
ting place, can we feel them in their beauty 
and their power. As in the previous books, 
so in this, the poet unfolds to us something 
of what he saw in man, filling out what he 
saw by forms and conditions of being 
needed for the full and happy development 
of all that is greatest and best within him. 
I dare not trust myself to make any further 
comment on this wonderful work ; but close 
the chapter by a long passage from Mr. 
Lowell's great article on Dante. 

" The man behind the verse is far greater 
than the verse itself, and the impulse he 
gives to what is deepest and most sacred 
in us, though we cannot always explain it, 
is none the less real and lasting. ... It 
is for his power of inspiring and sustaining, 



Dante. 79 

it is because they find in him a spur to 
noble aims, a secure refuge in that defeat 
which the present always seems, that they 
prize Dante who know and love him best. 
He is not merely a great poet, but an in- 
fluence, part of the soul's resources in time 
of trouble. . . . 

" All great poets have their message to 
deliver us, from something higher than 
they. We venture on no unworthy com- 
parison between him who reveals to us the 
beauty of this world's love and the grand- 
eur of this world's passion and him who 
shows that love of God is the fruit whereof 
all other loves are but the beautiful and 
fleeting blossom, that the passions are yet 
sublimer objects of contemplation, when, 
subdued by the will, they become patience 
in suffering and perseverance in the up- 
ward path. But we cannot help thinking 
that if Shakspere be the most comprehen- 
sive intellect, so Dante is the highest 
spiritual nature, that has expressed itself in 
rhythmical form. Had he merely made us 



80 The Great Poets as Religions Teachers. 

feel how petty the ambitions, sorrows and 
vexations of earth appear when looked 
down on from the heights of our own char- 
acter and the seclusion of our own genius, 
or from the region where we commune 
with God, he had done much. But he has 
done far more ; he has shown us the way 
by which that country far beyond the stars 
may be reached, may become the habitual 
dwelling-place and fortress of our nature, 
instead of being the object of its vague as- 
piration in moments of indolence. At the 
Round Table of King Arthur there was 
left always one seat empty for him who 
should accomplish the adventure of the 
Holy Grail. It was called the perilous seat 
because of the dangers that he must en- 
counter who would win it. In the company 
of the epic poets there was a place left for 
whoever should embody the Christian idea 
of a triumphant life, outwardly all defeat, 
inwardly victorious, who should make us 
partakers of that cup of sorrow in which all 
are communicants with Christ. He who 



Dante. 81 

should do this would indeed achieve the 
perilous seat, for he must combine poesy 
with doctrine in such cunning wise that 
the one lose not its beauty nor the other 
its sovereignty, and Dante has done it. As 
he takes possession of it, we seem to hear 
the cry he himself heard when Virgil re- 
joined the company of great singers, — 

"'All honor to the loftiest of poets.'" 

6 




IV. 

Shahspere. 



"And that each heart 
Hath, from the leaves of thy unvalued book, 
Those Delphic lines with deep impression took." 

Milton. 



SHAKSPERE. 




S Shakspere is of all his guild the 
most universal genius, he reveals 
to us what is in man as no other 
poet or philosopher has ever done. In 
his works we find not particular men with 
their individual and accidental peculiarities 
as they actually show themselves in life ; 
rather each person may be regarded as 
representing a peculiar type of manhood, 
with the qualities which belong to that type 
by virtue of his manhood, and which are 
therefore essential to his completeness. 
As we go through the vast range of Shak- 
spere's characters, so different in their 
original endowments and with capabilities 
brought out under such various conditions, 
and yet with certain qualities belonging 
alike to all by virtue of their common 



86 The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

humanity, we see how, in obedience to the 
laws and necessities of our nature, he fills 
out what is wanting in history or biography, 
and what would not improbably have been 
wanting in the persons themselves as they 
actually appeared in their individual de- 
portment. We do not find what Henry V. 
or Richard III. or Wolsey actually did 
and thought, but what the ideal type of 
manhood represented by that name should 
do or think under those circumstances so 
as to reveal to us more vividly and fully, 
and therefore more truly, than in actual life 
the elements which belong to our common 
humanity. 

Man, as delineated and filled out by the 
most original and comprehensive imagina- 
tion that has ever appeared in this world, 
is the subject of Shakspere's writings. 
As we study them and enter into their 
thought, we learn to feel what powers for 
good or evil are folded up within us, and 
what agencies are needed for the develop- 
ment and exercise of those powers. The 



Shakspere. 87 

eye could not have been formed without 
the sun, to whose existence and influence 
every fibre in its structure bears witness. 
Man's social organization could never have 
been evolved without the companionship 
of men and women. So the yet higher 
faculties, which every great poet finds mak- 
ing a vital part of our mental and spiritual 
constitution, could never have come into 
being, except in an atmosphere of divine 
justice, love, and mercy, filled out for us by 
the actual existence and presence of God. 
This great fact is illustrated everywhere 
in the writings of Shakspere. With him 
the complete man is endowed always with 
the religious element. And where that 
is, there, as its necessary concomitant, is 
an atmosphere pervaded by influences in 
which it may live and have its being. In 
this respect, Shakspere has done for those 
who speak the English language a work 
second only to that which is done by the 
sacred writings. And his word comes to 
us all the more with authority, inasmuch 



88 The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

as he does not write professedly, or perhaps 
consciously, as a religious teacher. 

In unfolding to us man's nature, this 
greatest of poets can no more separate 
him from religion, in his highest develop- 
ment and his highest moments, than he 
could separate him in his social affections 
from the human companionship which 
they require as essential to his happiness 
and well-being. To his imagination, fill- 
ing out the conception of a complete hu- 
manity, the idea of worship and of God as 
necessarily involved in the idea of wor- 
ship can in no wise be left out. The 
finest influences of nature, the heaviest re- 
sponsibilities, the deepest and holiest af- 
fections, find their truest direction, their 
purest inspiration, encouragement, and 
support in this higher realm. And when 
men violate the laws of their moral and 
spiritual constitution, from this higher 
realm come admonitions and retributions 
to appall the evil-doer, and thus confirm 
the moral order of the universe. 



Shakspere. 89 

All this we find in Shakspere hardly less 
than in the Gospels. I will not say, as 
has been said, that Shakspere is the most 
Christian poet that ever lived ; but I do 
say that often, both in spirit and in method, 
he, more than any other writer, reminds 
me of the Gospel teachings. No two 
things could be more unlike, in their imme- 
diate purpose or final intention, than the 
words of Him who came to redeem the 
world from sin, and the writings prepared 
to entertain a popular audience at a Lon- 
don theatre. No one probably has felt 
this contrast more painfully than the poet 
himself. Hence, the pathetic strain in 
which he chides " with Fortune," as he 
says : — 

" That did not better for my life provide 
Than public means which public manners breeds. 
Thence comes it that my name receives a brand ; 
And almost thence my nature is subdued 
To what it works in, like the dyer's hand." 

It is always with a profound and most 
touching reverence that he refers to Jesus, 
as in passages like these : — 



go The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

" In those holy fields 
Over whose acres walked those blessed feet 
Which fourteen hundred years ago were nailed 
For our advantage on the bitter cross." 

"Alas, alas! 
Why all the souls that were were forfeit once; 
And he that might the vantage best have took 
Found out the remedy. How would you be, 
If He, which is the top of judgment, should 
But judge you as you are ? " 

Many things there are in his dramas 
which we would gladly expunge, and in 
which he yielded to his own rollicking dis- 
position or to the requirements of the 
stage and of the times. But his gentle 
Christian spirit, so merciful and at the 
same time so true, goes with him wherever 
he goes. His subject is man, into whose 
nature he looks with a quick and profound 
insight and a tender sympathy with men 
of all sorts and conditions, recognizing in 
them everywhere affecting tokens of a 
common brotherhood. His keenness of 
perception does not, like the policeman's 
dark lantern, rejoice only in detecting the 
malefactor. But with a more ardent joy 



Shakspere. gi 

he uses it as a kindly light to discover 
" some soul of goodness in things evil," — 
and even in bad men. Thus it is that he 
awakens in us an interest in persons whom 
we might find intolerable if we should 
meet them in actual life. It is not what 
we might see in them, but what the great 
poet of humanity who is speaking to us 
through them sees, that so deeply inter- 
ests us. 

Thus it is that he reveals to us often, 
where we should least expect to find them, 
marks of consanguinity which cannot fail 
to touch our hearts as they did his. Even 
so poor a creature as Falstaff is not sent 
away as an utter outcast at last, but bab- 
bling "of green fields/' and crying "out 
'God, God, God,' three or four times," his 
last moments being thus embalmed by the 
sweet memories of his childhood, and the 
one word which may well place us all on 
the same lowly level, as common suppli- 
ants before the Infinite mercy. May not 
this sympathy with a very sinful man re- 



Q2 The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

mind us of One who looked with loving 
compassion on those whom very respect- 
able and devout men would drive away 
from their presence as unworthy and un- 
clean ? 

And this faculty of seeing quite through 
the deeds of men and showing them to us 
as they are, with a kindly regard to the 
good qualities which may be bound up 
with what is evil in them, is not confined 
to the poet's treatment of persons compar- 
atively insignificant or worthless. With 
equal tenderness and justice, "speaking 
the truth in love," he deals with men of 
world-wide celebrity whose overmastering 
faults otherwise might hide their less con- 
spicuous virtues. A careful examination of 
his writings, with this object in view, will 
perhaps reveal him in a new light to one 
whose attention has not been called to this 
Christ-like feature in the judgments, so 
true and yet so merciful, which he passes 
on the great men whom he calls up before 
his judgment seat. As one of many exam- 



Sbakspere. 93 

pies, we may take " the great child of 
honor, Cardinal Wolsey," as Queen Kath- 
arine called him. What can be more ten- 
der, more touchingly beautiful, or more 
severely true than the way in which his 
name and memory are dealt with, when, 

M Full of repentance, 
Continual meditations, tears and sorrows, 
He gave his honors to the world again, 
His blessed part to heaven, and slept in peace ! " 

Of " too much honor,'' he had been 
made to say before, — 

" O 't is a burden, Cromwell, 't is a burden 
Too heavy for a man that hopes for heaven.*' 
" O Cromwell, Cromwell, 
Had I but served my God with half the zeal 
I served my king, he would not in mine age 
Have left me naked to my enemies." 

And when he died, after his faults and 
his sins, his unbounded ambition, his 
double dealing, his cruelty towards those 
who stood in his way, have been faithfully 
recounted, his grander qualities — " fash- 
ioned " as he was " to much honor from 
his cradle " — are lovingly brought out. 

" His overthrow heaped happiness upon him; 
For then, and not till then, he felt himself, 



94 The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

And found the blessedness of being little : 

And, to add greater honors to his age 

Than man could give him, he died feaiing God." 

Well might the dying queen, after hear- 
ing this, say : — 

" Whom I most hated living, thou hast made me, 
With thy religious truth and modesty, 
Now in his ashes honor : peace be with him." 

But there is a broader sense in which 
the relationship of our greatest poet to 
the Gospels shows itself. There is noth- 
ing forced or conventional in the moral 
and religious ideas which run through his 
dramas. The lesson and the feelings ap- 
propriate to it flow out of the subject as 
naturally as perfume from the rose. Two 
young lovers, listening to music in the 
delicious moonlight of an Italian evening, 
prompted by the exuberance of their joy, 
break out into thoughts like these : — 

" Look, how the floor of heaven 
Is thick inlaid with patens of bright gold : 
There 's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st 
But in his motion like an angel sings, 
Still quiring to the young-ey'd cherubims, — 
Such harmony is in immortal souls; 
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay 
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it." 



Shahspere. . 95 

Henry V., before the battle of Agin- 
court, with the solicitude natural to a mon- 
arch under circumstances so critical, goes 
through his camp in the darkness of the 
night before the day had begun to dawn, 
and thus gives utterance to the thoughts 
that press most heavily upon him : — 

" Not to-day, O Lord, 

not to-day, think not upon the fault 
My father made in compassing the crown! 

1 Richard's body have interred new; 

And on it have bestowed more contrite tears 
Than from it issued forced drops of blood : 
Five hundred poor I have in yearly pay, 
Who twice a-day their withered hands hold up 
Toward heaven, to pardon blood. . . . 

. . . More will I do; 
Though all that I can do is nothing worth, 
Since that my penitence comes after all, 
Imploring pardon." 

In " Hamlet," the guilty king, left to him- 
self, breaks out into these words : — 

" But, O, what form of prayer 
Can serve my turn ? Forgive me my foul murder ? 
That cannot be; since I am still possessed 
Of those effects for which I did the murder, — 
My crown, mine own ambition, and my queen. 
May one be pardoned, and retain th' offence ? "' 

In " Richard III.," before the last fatal 



96 The Great. Poets as Religious Teachers. 

battle, Shakspere depicts, in visions of judg- 
ment and terror, the workings of a guilty 
conscience, unnerving the warrior whose 
resolution and courage had never failed 
him before in any desperate emergency. 

Queen Katharine, in the near prospect 
of death, waking out of sleep, exclaims, — 

" Spirits of peace, where are ye ? are ye all gone, 
And leave me here in wretchedness behind ye ? 

Griffith. Madam, we 're here. 

Kath. It is not you I call for. 
Saw ye none enter since I slept ? 

Grif. None, Madam. 

Kath. No? Saw you not, even now, a blessed troop 
Invite me to a banquet ; whose bright faces 
Cast thousand beams upon me like the sun? 
They promised me eternal happiness, 
And brought me garlands, Griffith, which I feel 
I am not worthy yet to wear: I shall, 
Assuredly." 

In all these cases, hardly less than in 
the Gospel narratives, we are compassed 
about by moral and religious forces, pre- 
sented to us here, as there, under imagin- 
ative forms, and all, not for the sake of 
teaching a lesson, but as the natural and 
spontaneous utterances of the human soul. 



Sbakspere. gj 

I doubt whether there is a single essen- 
tial doctrine or precept of the Gospels 
which is not directly or indirectly recog- 
nized and enforced by Shakspere. This 
he has done, not only in scenes like those 
from which we have quoted, and in the 
retributions which work themselves out by 
natural processes in his plays, but often in 
short single sentences, often single ejacu- 
lations, forced from men under the press- 
ure of the moment. 

" Let us know 
Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well, 
When our deep plots do fail : and that should teach us 
There's a divinity that shapes our ends, 
Rough hew them how we will." 

" The quality of mercy is not strained, 
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven 
Upon the place beneath: It is twice blessed, 
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes." 

"Ah, what a sign it is of evil life, 
When death's approach is seen so terrible." 

" The immortal part needs a physician ; 
Though that be sick it dies not." 

" The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices 
Make instruments to scourge us." 

Many pages might be filled with pas- 

7 



g8 The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

sages of similar import, all recognizing re- 
ligion as a necessity of our nature. 

Shakspere's religion is preeminently a 
natural religion. It comes everywhere as 
a spontaneous utterance to meet the deeper 
wants of our being. He who, more than 
any other poet, sounded all the depths of 
our nature, and knew as no one else had 
known the secret workings of the soul, 
finds everywhere substantially the great 
truths of the Gospel naturally adapting 
themselves to the mind of man, and creat- 
ing around him an atmosphere in which 
his highest faculties can live and thrive 
under the severest trials, and in the great- 
est emergencies of his earthly experience. 
In Shakspere's works, as in the book of 
nature, we meet these wonderful revela- 
tions of divine truth. They rise before us 
by no arbitrary processes or mechanical 
ingenuity. As the vibrating chandelier or 
the falling apple, to the penetrating imag- 
ination of Galileo or Newton, laid open 
what had hitherto been a hidden law of 



Sbakspere. 99 

the material universe, so the manifold 
operations of the human mind and heart 
laid open to the imagination of Shakspere 
the essential wants, and in them the laws, 
of our moral and spiritual being. And 
those laws, as he represents them, both in 
themselves and in their mode of expres- 
sion, are essentially the same that we find 
in the Gospels. 

Both bring before us by easy and natural 
methods what commends itself to us at 
once as the religion of nature. And by 
nature I mean the whole physical and 
moral universe, each section an organic 
part of one infinite whole. So it seemed 
to Shakspere, as the passages I have 
quoted and an intelligent reading of his 
works may show. The world, to his mind, 
was not divided into separate compart- 
ments, one portion sacred and the other 
profane, but every part belonged to the 
universal order, which is divine, and every 
man had in his own organization that 
which allied him to what is highest and 



wo The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

best. As the humblest plant reaching up 
through the darkness of the earth seeks 
the air and sunshine as its own inheritance, 
and every fibre as it is evolved tells of its 
relationship to them, so the human soul, 
reaching up through the obstructions of 
time and sense, by every higher thought 
and sentiment evolved within it, claims as 
its birthright the fostering help of the 
highest moral and spiritual laws and agen- 
cies. There are no elaborate arguments, 
no evidences or cunningly devised systems 
of morals or divinity ; but wherever man 
is awakened by his deepest and loftiest ex- 
periences, there the fitting atmosphere is 
found, and the soul, like a new-born infant, 
breathes its native air, and finds in that 
purer realm its appropriate nourishment. 

When a man's higher faculties are born, 
they find the higher realm which reveals 
itself to his spiritual, as the material world 
reveals itself to his bodily, eye. So it is in 
Shakspere. He looked into the soul of 
man, and filled out what he saw there by 



Shakspere. 101 

the conception of a world of spiritual ideas, 
laws, and agencies implied by it and es- 
sential to its completeness. To him the 
natural and the supernatural were but har- 
monious parts of the same divine order. 
And is not this precisely what we find in 
the Gospels ? The outward form is differ- 
ent, but the substantial results are the 
same. Men have thrown around the Gos- 
pels and substituted for them their artifi- 
cially constructed theories of Christianity. 
But in the Gospels themselves all is clear 
and natural as the sunlight. If there are 
doctrines which are not understood, it is 
either because they are obscured by the 
glosses which human ingenuity has put 
upon them, or because, like operations in 
the material world which are not yet un- 
derstood, they lie too deep, or are too far 
in advance of our present attainments, to 
be fully comprehended. Truths the most 
salutary and far-reaching — truths which 
enter vitally into the deepest workings of 
our nature — open before us in the Ser- 



102 The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

mon on the Mount as naturally and with as 
benignant a grace as hill and valley reveal 
themselves to us at the approach of the 
morning light. And as it has been in the 
past, so in all future ages, we believe, with 
every new accession of life from within or 
of light from abroad to the individual or 
the race, they will unfold themselves with 
increasing vitality and power. 

Nothing can be more natural than the 
teachings of Jesus. His appeal is to the 
mind and heart of those around him. We 
need only to read his life and words to see 
that with him natural and revealed religion 
are one. Everywhere, in man and nature, 
he beholds the indwelling and perpetually 
creative presence of God. Heaven is his 
throne, the earth is his footstool. The 
flowers of the field, the raven and the spar- 
row, still more his disciples, and even the 
poorest outcast among men, are objects of 
his loving care. Religion with its benefi- 
cent laws and ministrations is everywhere 
recognized as a vital influence, interfusing 



Shakspere. 103 

itself through all that is sweetest and best 
in nature and in man. The more pro- 
foundly we enter, with our deepest thought 
and experiences, into the Sermon on the 
Mount, the more clearly shall we see how 
naturally the religion of Jesus adjusts itself 
to the highest wants and faculties of our 
nature. He who saw, as no one else has 
ever done, the hand and the mind of God 
everywhere in what were to others only 
"the hidings of his power," had but to lift 
the veil which obscured the vision of those 
around him, and lo, everything became a 
token or a revelation of God's most holy 
laws and his beneficent dealings with his 
children. Jesus did not create "life and 
immortality." He " brought " them "to 
light." From the beginning to the end of 
the Gospels, it is the uplifting of a veil, or 
rather the opening of our eyes, that we 
may see facts which had been kept secret 
so long, only because they were waiting 
for some one able to see and to reveal 
them in all their gracious influences. 



W4 The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

And in harmony with the Gospels are 
the lessons taught us by the greatest of all 
poets. In the power of filling out what is 
seen of man in his earthly environment by 
the additional conception of the laws and 
agencies associated with him as a living 
member of God's unseen kingdom, there 
can of course be no comparison between 
the two. But the poet's transcendent im- 
agination carries him farther in this direc- 
tion than any other poet has ever gone, 
and as far as he goes, by his own indepen- 
dent processes, he reaches substantially the 
same results, filling out what others see in 
human life and conduct by the unseen 
moral and spiritual facts involved in them. 
His words, like those of Jesus, are not to 
be taken literally, but as symbols of what 
no human language can express so forcibly 
in any other way. And in proportion as 
the poet rises above individual and acci- 
dental distinctions, his images, like alge- 
braical characters, become exponents of 
facts which belong, not as individual char- 



Sbakspere. 105 

acteristics, to one man or another, but as 
qualities imbedded in our nature, and mak- 
ing a part of our human constitution. 

Dante follows his characters on after 
death, and in what awaits them there fills 
out for us his conception of the conse- 
quences involved in the lives they lived 
on earth. Shakspere, on the other hand, 
while not unmindful of "the life to come," 
reveals to us the unseen influences for 
weal or woe which meet us here "upon 
this bank and shoal of time." Mightier 
than any earthly condition are these min- 
istrations of divine justice or mercy. 

Take Macbeth as an illustration of his 
method. He comes before us, a brave man, 
whose deeds of loyalty and courage gain 
for him — 

"Golden opinions from all sorts of people," 

together with thanks and praise and new 
dignities from the king. But no sooner 
has an unhallowed ambition gained a foot- 
hold in his mind, than it begins to throw 
its baleful shadows around him. 



106 The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

" Present fears 
Are less than horrible imaginings." 

As he approaches the act of treachery and 
murder, " these compunctious visitings of 
nature " grow more terrible. His courage 
fails. 

" We will proceed no further in this business." 

When stimulated and forced on by his wife 
so as to 

" Bend up 
Each corporal agent to this terrible feat, ,, 

the whole atmosphere, to him, is filled with 
blood and terror. 

" Thou sure and firm set earth, 
Hear not my steps which way they walk, for fear 
The very stones prate of my whereabout, 
And take the present horror from the time, 
Which now suits with it." 

And when the deed is done, this awful 
nemesis makes itself immediately and still 
more fearfully felt. 

" Methought I heard a voice cry ' Sleep no more ! 

Macbeth does murder sleep.' . . . 

Still it cried ' Sleep no more ! ' to all the house : 
* Glamis hath murdered sleep, and therefore Cawdor 

Shall sleep no more, — Macbeth shall sleep no more.'' " 



Shakspere. ioj 

" How is 't with me, when every noise appalls me ? 
What hands are here ? ha ! they pluck out mine eyes. 
Will all great Neptune ? s ocean wash this blood 
Clean from my hand? " 

And so, through the whole downward 
progress of his life, the fatal work of retri- 
bution is going on. Unseen terrors be- 
come overpowering realities. In the ful- 
ness of kingly grandeur, he grows to be 
more and more the victim of " horrible 
imaginings." 

" Better be with the dead 
Whom we, to gain our place, have sent to peace, 
Than on the torture of the mind to lie 
In restless ecstacy. Duncan is in his grave; 
After life's fitful fever he sleeps well ; 
Treason has done his worst : nor steel, nor poison, 
Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing, 
Can touch him further." 

New crimes only lead him into new com- 
plications of wretchedness. All the joy of 
life is gone forever. He has " supped full 
with horrors." 

" I 'm sick at heart. 



I've lived long enough: my way of life 
Is fall'n into the sear, the yellow leaf; 
And that which should accompany old age, 
As honor, love, obedience, troops of friends, 
I must not look to have." 



io8 The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

" Out, out, brief candle ! 
Life 's but a walking shadow ; a poor player, 
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, 
And then is heard no more." 

Except in the New Testament, I know 
not where we can find such a lesson of ret- 
ribution, working out by natural processes 
the terrible consequences of evil-doing in 
the soul, and picturing them to us by im- 
ages expressing such unspeakable desola- 
tion and sorrow. 

And not less does the poet unfold to us, 
in characters of perennial light and beauty, 
the sweet and blessed experiences of self- 
forgetting love and purity, the moral eleva- 
tion and inward satisfactions which go with 
those who, living true and faithful lives, 
are yet subjected to the sharpest disap- 
pointments and sorrows. Queen Kath- 
arine has already been brought forward as 
an example of this kind. We have seen 
how, through the imagination of the poet, 
her last hours, otherwise so dismal, were 
lighted up by visions of transcendent joy 
and loveliness. 



Shakspere. wg 

The inward satisfactions which entered 
so deeply and with so vital a power into 
the mind and heart of Cordelia are not 
easily described. Her whole history, su- 
perficially considered, is such a violation 
of the laws of a righteous retribution as to 
shock the moral sensibilities of a shallow- 
minded and profligate generation. For this 
reason, some third-rate poet in the time 
of Charles II., with nothing of Shakspere's 
profound moral and spiritual insight, gave 
the tragedy a prosperous conclusion, thus 
debasing and vulgarizing the sublime con- 
ceptions of the poet. ' And in this muti- 
lated condition, it held its place on the 
stage a hundred and sixty years. 

As she came from the creative imagina- 
tion of the poet, Cordelia is the richest, 
deepest, most entirely unselfish, the most 
profoundly pious, and the most perfectly 
harmonized of all his characters. She 
lived in a heathen age and land, but in her 
we find fulfilled what Mr. Lowell meant 
when he spoke of embodying " the Chris- 



i io The Great Poets as Religions Teachers. 

tian idea of a triumphant life, outwardly all 
defeat, inwardly victorious." She is en- 
dowed with the finest qualities of our 
nature, called into exercise under the most 
trying conditions, and in them we see re- 
flected the richest gifts and graces of our 
religion. The beatitudes dwell in her as 
in their own beautiful and native home. 
In her is an infinite wealth of love, — a life 
fed from the eternal fountain, and endowed 
with a joy and peace which the world can 
no more give than it can take away. 

To such natures, under the fiercest tri- 
als, there is given, as by divine appoint- 
ment, an exaltation of soul, which looks 
down on pain and grief and whatever there 
may be worse than these with a sublime 
unconsciousness of evil. So is it with 
Cordelia. She needs not the wealth or the 
happiness of this world, but rather its trials 
to call out within her what is sweetest and 
best. In her heart, which, like that of 
Chaucer's distance, is " a chamber of holi- 
ness," and in such a life as hers, there 



Sbakspere. 1 1 1 

abides a jewel richer than all the world be- 
side, which can borrow no additional worth 
from outward circumstances, and would 
only cheapen itself by seeking the costliest 
materials that could be used to set it off. 
Outwardly everything turns against her. 
But sorrows and sacrifices are transfigured 
by the soul that shines through them. 

"Patience and sorrow strove 
Who should express her goodliest." 

When she wept, — 

" She shook 
The holy water from her heavenly eyes." 

" In brief, sorrow 
Would be a rarity most belov'd, if all 
Could so become it." 

Well might her father say of her, — 

"Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia, 
The gods themselves throw incense." 

Each new aggravation of wrong only 
takes her up into a higher realm. When 
the last terrible ordeal has come, there is 
no sign of weakness, no cry of distress. 
" We are not the first," she calmly says, — 

" Who, with best meaning, have incurred the worst." 



H2 The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

In the sublime elevation where she 
stands, death has no power to harm or 
terrify, but is welcomed rather as a con- 
secration and a sacrament. She dies, to 
be crowned with an eternal loveliness 
and beauty ; young indeed, but by no un- 
timely end. For we know that the highest 
purposes of life have been fulfilled in her, 
and that life so lost will assuredly be found. 
In the creation and treatment of such a 
character, Shakspere shows how thoroughly 
he could enter into the deepest spiritual 
resources of our nature, and how well he 
could appreciate the feelings of him, who, 
the evening before his crucifixion, with a 
full knowledge of what lay before him on 
the morrow, and with all the powers of 
darkness arrayed and apparently prevail- 
ing against him, could ask no better gift 
for his friends than that his joy might be 
fulfilled in them. 

The view which I have given of Cordelia 
may, to some persons, appear far-fetched 
and extravagant. But it places the closing 



Shakspere. 1 13 

scenes of "King Lear" on a level with what 
has gone before, and makes of them a fit- 
ting conclusion to what Mr. Furness justly 
calls " the sublimest tragedy ever written, 
so awful in its grandeur that it almost 
passes into a realm by itself." 

Very wonderful is the faculty which 
Shakspere has of taking us up almost with- 
out our knowing it, by means of some 
powerful emotion, into his own mountain- 
heights of vision, and drawing us into har- 
mony with his holiest and loftiest creations, 
so that their lightest breath touches a 
chord, and brings forth kindred music in 
our hearts. Without saying one word 
concerning religion, he makes us feel its 
presence, as an all-pervading atmosphere, 
blending with our deepest emotions, and 
awakening in us the sentiments of rever- 
ence and prayer. In the stormiest sea of 
troubles its heavenly spirit comes, as the 
dove over the waste and troubled waters of 
a deluged world, with its olive branch of 
peace. And when we have been racked 



H4 The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

and distressed by tempests of passion, by 
crime and outward horrors, this same spirit, 
reflected from the very blackness of the 
storm, shines with a diviner light into our 
hearts, as did the bow of promise when 
God first placed it in the clouds, a token 
of his loving presence, and a sign that he 
would no more destroy the earth. 

It is a great thing for us who speak the 
English language, that our greatest poet 
should have been so grandly endowed with 
the faculty which looks through " this 
muddy vesture of decay " and the shadows 
it throws around us, into what is spiritual 
and divine ; that he should have been able 
to enter so far within the veil, and bring 
thence from " the holy of holies " qualities 
of such unspeakable worth and beauty, to 
enlarge our conceptions of what is fairest 
and best, and so to exalt, enrich, and adorn 
for us this human life of ours, and show us 
how it can be made divine. 



V. 

Goethe. 



'All things transitory 
But as symbols are sent." 
Faust. 



GOETHE. 




"N these papers I am speaking of 
the great poets only as religious 
teachers. Whatever I may say of 
their personal characteristics or of their 
poetical merits in other respects is only 
incidental, or in its relation to my principal 
subject. The fact on which I would dwell 
is, that no really great poet who knows 
what is in man has been able to fill out his 
conception of a complete and perfected 
manhood without recognizing religion as 
its deepest and highest attribute. 

As a further illustration of this I would 
take Goethe's " Faust," which his biogra- 
pher, Herman Grimm, with perhaps par- 
donable extravagance, calls " this greatest 
work of the greatest poet of all nations 



/ 1 8 The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

and times." I cannot but think that Goethe 
better understood his own position. He 
said : When the Schlegels " tried to raise 
him (Tieck) above his proper place and 
spoke of him as my equal, they made a 
mistake. I do not hesitate to speak of 
myself as I am : I did not make myself. 
But I might, with as much propriety, com- 
pare myself with Shakspere, who also is as 
he was made, a being of higher order than 
myself, to whom I must look and pay due 
reverence." 

Five days before his death Goethe said, 
in a letter to his friend, William von Hum- 
boldt, " For more than sixty years have I 
had before me my youthful conception of 
Faust, — the whole series having been 
from the first clear to me, though not in all 
their details." In his Dedication to the 
first part of the tragedy, written more than 
thirty years before the second part was 
finished, he already speaks, of those who 
witnessed its beginning as belonging to a 
past generation. 



Goethe. ug 

11 They hear no longer these succeeding measures, 
The souls, to whom my earliest songs I sang: 
Dispersed the friendly troop, with all its pleasures, 
And still, alas! the echoes first that rang! 
I bring the unknown multitude my treasures ; 
Their very plaudits give my heart a pang, 
And those beside, whose joy my Song so flattered, 
If still they live, wide through the world are scattered. 

i( And grasps me now a long-unwonted yearning 
For that serene and solemn Spirit-Land; 
My song, to faint yEolian murmurs turning, 
Sways like a harp-string by the breezes fanned. 
I thrill and tremble; tear on tear is burning, 
And the stern heart is tenderly unmanned. 
What I possess, I see far distant lying, 
And what I lost, grows real and undying." 

I copy from Bayard Taylor's Transla- 
tion of Faust, which, with its acompany- 
ing notes, furnishes most of the available 
help needed by the student who would 
understand this remarkable work. 

The poem opened upon Goethe in his 
early youth, and, during his whole life of 
more than fourscore years, it held a fore- 
most place in his thoughts, tasking his 
highest powers of invention to fill out in 
detail his conception of the capabilities 
and wants of our nature. As in the works 



120 The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

of Dante and Shakspere, so in this, his 
greatest work, the subject is Man. The 
old story of Faust's compact with the devil 
furnishes the groundwork of the plot. 

Faust, a student, has exhausted all the 
sources of knowledge open to him, and 
finds for himself no real satisfaction or re- 
pose. It is Easter Sunday. But the songs 
which he hears from the streets, of Disci- 
ples and Angels, only awaken a painful 
sense of what he has lost in being taken 
away from his early faith. 

" Once Heavenly Love sent down a burning kiss 
Upon my brow, in Sabbath silence holy ; 

And, filled with mystic presage, chimed the church bell slowly, 
And prayer dissolved me in a fervent bliss. 
A sweet, uncomprehended yearning 
Drove forth my feet through woods and meadows free, 
And while a thousand tears were burning, 
I felt a world arise for me. 



Sound on, ye hymns of Heaven, so sweet and mild! 
My tears gush forth: the Earth takes back her child! " 

While he is in this unsatisfied and un- 
believing state, the devil, under the name 
of Mephistopheles, appears, and offers to 
serve him. This offer Faust accepts, with 



Goethe. 121 

the single condition, that if ever he should 
be entirely happy for a single moment, that 
day should be his last. 

" When thus I hail the Moment flying: 
' Ah, still delay — thou art so fair ! J 

Then bind me in thy bonds undying, 

My final ruin then declare ! 

Then let the death-bell chime the token, 

Then art thou from thy service free! 

The clock may stop, the hand be broken, 

Then Time be finished unto me." 

The problem, then, to be solved by the 
poem is, What can so far satisfy a human 
soul, that for a single moment it shall be 
entirely happy ? All the resources of this 
world, of knowledge, wealth, and art, of so- 
ciety and nature, supplemented by " super- 
natural solicitings " and aids, are placed at 
the young man's disposal. Whatever can 
fascinate the senses, or gratify his love of 
pleasure or power, whatever his ambition 
or his passions may desire, is freely granted 
to him. But with all these helps he only 
grows more restless and unsatisfied. He 
falls in love with Margaret, a young and 
innocent maiden, the type of earthly 



122 The Great Poets as Religions Teachers. 

beauty. But love which is not regulated 
and sanctioned by a diviner law brings 
only unhappiness and ruin. Through all 
his experiences in this direction there has 
never been a moment to which he could 
say : — 

"Ah, still delay— thou art so fair.*' 

The search for selfish gratification ends in 
utter discomfiture and sadness to himself, 
and in sorrow and death to the only being 
that he loves. In " The Inferno " of Dante 
there is no pathos more touching, or more 
profoundly tragical, than that which asso- 
ciates itself with Margaret ; and no wail of 
grief more piercing than that which comes 
to us from this heart-broken, conscience- 
smitten, frightened child, the victim rather 
than the accomplice of Faust. With the 
loss of maidenly innocence, all her happi- 
ness is gone. Her spinning song, — 

"My peace is gone, 
My heart is sore, 
I never shall find it, 
Ah, never more! " — 

is too well known to be repeated here. 



Goethe. 1 2) 

So is her cry of anguish to the Virgin 
Mother, the Mater Dolorosa. 

" Alone, and ah ! unsleeping, 
I 'm weeping, weeping, weeping, 
The heart within me breaks. 

" The pots before my window, 
Alas! my tears did wet, 
As in the early morning 
For thee these flowers I set. 

" Within my lonely chamber 
The morning sun shone red : 
I sat, in utter sorrow, 
Already on my bed. 

" Help ! rescue me from death and stain ! 
O Maiden! 
Thou sorrow-laden, 
Incline thy countenance upon my pain ! n 

In the great cathedral, while they are 
singing the Judgment Hymn, the air be- 
comes too close for her. 

- ' I feel as if the organ here 
My breath takes from me." 

" I cannot breathe ! 
The massy pillars 
Imprison me ! 
The vaulted arches 
Crush me ! — Air ! " 



124 The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

She is driven from one to another ex- 
treme of wretchedness. She is tried for 
child-murder, and convicted. She lies in 
prison, helpless and hopeless, condemned 
to death, and awaiting the hour when the 
executioner shall come for her. Faust, in 
the darkness of night, finds his way to her, 
and hopes to rescue her. The poor fright- 
ened child mistakes him for the headsman, 
and cries out in terror : — 

" Art thou a man, then pity my distress ! " 
"Thou'rt come for me at midnight-hour; 

Have mercy on me, let me live ! 

Is't not soon enough when morning chime has rung? 

And I am yet so young, so young ! 

And now Death comes, and ruin! 

I, too, was fair, and that was my undoing. 

My love was near, but now he 's far ; 

Torn lies the wreath, scattered the blossoms are 

Seize me not thus so violently ! 

Spare me ! What have I done to thee ? " 
"O let us kneel, and call the Saints to hide us!" 
" Judgment of God! myself to thee I give. " 
" Thine am I, Father ! rescue me ! 

Ye angels, holy cohorts, guard me, 

Camp around, and from evil ward me!" 

In confusion, anguish, and supplication, 
Margaret disappears. Mephistopheles, 



Goethe. 125 

with an air of triumph, eagerly exclaims, 
" She is judged." And from afar, as from 
another world, a voice is heard, saying : 
" She is saved." Faust, hearing his name 
spoken by Margaret, vanishes in darkness 
and misery. And no moment has ever yet 
come to which he could say, — 

"Ah, still delay — thou art so fair! " 

Here endeth the first lesson. 



Fifty years have passed by, and Faust, 
in the Second Part of the tragedy, is again 
placed before us. He is now eighty years 
old. He has left the young man's life be- 
hind, with its impulses and passions. The 
little world of ambitions and indulgences 
centring in himself has long since been 
given up. He now belongs to the larger 
world of human interests, and is to take 
part in the great onward movements of 
humanity. 

He first appears amid beautiful objects 
of nature. Aerial spirits are circling round 
him in the balmy airs of spring, to refresh 



126 The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

him in body and mind. And in order to 
separate him entirely from the tumultuous 
experiences which lie now so far behind, 
they sing to him : — 

M Now the Hours are cancelled for thee, 
Pain and bliss have fled away: 
Thou art whole : let faith restore thee ! 
Trust the new, the rising Day ! ' ' 

He feels the inspiration, and says : — 

" Life *s pulses now with fresher force awaken 
To greet the mild ethereal twilight o'er me; 
This night, thou, Earth! hast also stood unshaken, 
And now thou breathest new-refreshed before me, 
And now beginnest, all thy gladness granting, 
A vigorous resolution to restore me, 
To seek that highest life for which I 'm panting." 

" That highest life " he is now to seek. 
The disappointments and sufferings which 
he went through long years ago have 
helped to give clearness and steadiness to 
his mind, and to free the atmosphere from 
the false coloring by which he had once 
been deceived and misled. With mature 
ideas and purposes, guided by the intellect 
more than by personal feeling, he engages 
in interests and pursuits closely connected 
with the well-being of man and his higher 



Goethe. 1 2/ 

development, and thus enters on his new 
and more comprehensive career. 

" Faust/' says Bayard Taylor, " in the 
First Part, is an individual, in narrow asso- 
ciation with other individuals ; here he is 
thrown into the movement of the world, 
the phenomena of human development, 
and becomes, to a certain extent, typical of 
man." 

By the aid of Mephistopheles, who is be- 
coming more his servant, and less and less 
a ruling or guiding spirit, all the resources 
of this world, physical, intellectual, and 
moral, as they present themselves to the 
imagination of the poet in his ever enlarg- 
ing attainments and experiences, are placed 
at his disposal. 

He attaches himself to the Emperor, but 
amid the trickeries, formalities, and cor- 
ruptions of government he finds no way 
by which he can render any really impor- 
tant service. Mephistopheles willingly 
enough helps him to relieve his sovereign 
from his financial embarrassments by the 



128 The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

indefinite issue of paper money ; for that is 
one of the Devil's tricks. He also very 
willingly helps the Emperor to win battles ; 
for in the cruelties and wrongs perpetrated 
by war he finds himself entirely at home. 
But when he is required to restore to life 
Helena of Greece, that the people may be 
refined and purified by her, that is, by a 
higher type of beauty and consequently a 
higher aesthetic culture, Mephistopheles, 
seeing in this an influence unfavorable to 
his ascendency, very unwillingly lends his 
aid. But Faust, who has turned wearily 
from one after another of the prizes which 
men covet most, gladly seeks for what is 
highest in classic art (personified under 
the name of Helena) as an efficient factor 
in the advancement of society. 

"The sense of the Beautiful in the hu- 
man mind,' , says Bayard Taylor, " is intro- 
duced as a most important agent in human 
culture, gradually refining and purifying 
Faust's nature, and lifting it forever above 
all the meanness and littleness of the 



Goethe. 129 

world." Beauty is not employed here, as 
in the First Part, to allure the senses and ts 
excite the passions, but in the higher form 
suggested by Goethe when he says : " The 
Beautiful is a primeval phenomenon, which 
indeed never becomes visible itself, but the 
reflection of which is seen in a thousand 
various expressions of the creative mind, 
as various and as manifold as the phe- 
nomena of Nature." Faust's consecration 
and devotion to this primeval beauty is 
symbolized by his love for Helena and his 
union with her. But the union of a mortal 
man with a perfect ideal beauty cannot be 
a permanent relation. The child which is 
born to them, and which represents poetry, 
produced by a union of the Classic with the 
Romantic, breaks loose from their control, 
and soon dies, leaving only his " garment, 
mantle, and lyre " upon the ground. 
Hardly has the funeral dirge for him ceased, 
when Helena says to Faust, — 

" Also in me, alas ! an old word proves its truth, 
That Bliss and Beauty ne'er enduringly unite. 

9 



ijo The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

Torn is the link of life, no less than that of love ; 
So, both lamenting, painfully I say : Farewell ! 
And cast myself again — once only — in thine arms." 

Her corporeal part disappears ; only her 
garment and veil remain with him. The 
Goddess herself — the divine beauty which 
she represents — is gone. But the gar- 
ment in which she was enfolded is his. 

" Hold fast what now alone remains to thee. 



It is no more the Goddess thou hast lost, 
But godlike is it. For thy use employ 
The grand and priceless gift, and soar aloft ! 
'Twill bear thee swift from all things mean and low 
To ether high, so long thou canst endure." 

" Helena's garments dissolve into clouds, 
surround Faust, lift him aloft in the air, 
and move away with him." He is thus 
borne upward into a higher plane, even 
while losing the soul and essence of her 
being, and clinging only to the garments 
which she has left behind. Far more up- 
lifting and effective is Dante's vision, when 
the Beatrice whom he had loved and rev- 
erenced on earth had been made immortal 
by the touch of death ! As the imperson- 
ation to him of divine truth and beauty, 



Goethe. 131 

she still cares for him, saves him from the 
deadly snares of sin, and leads him upward 
through the opening heavens, unfolding to 
him more and more of her divine radiance 
and beauty as he rises with her, through 
deeper experiences, with powers of vision 
constantly refined and enlarged. 

Faust indeed is enlightened and raised 
above his former self, but not satisfied. 
His next step is to control nature and 
bend it to the service of man. He obliges 
Mephistopheles sorely against his will to 
reclaim a great amount of fertile land from 
the ocean. This land is assigned to Faust. 
He devises methods by which he shall 
make it the abode of thousands of happy 
families. Just at this time he sees that an 
elevated spot near him, which has long 
been occupied by a family of poor people, 
impairs his prospect. He endeavors to 
purchase it. But the old proprietor would 
think it sacrilege to sell the land which 
has come down to him from his fathers 
through many generations. In a moment 



i $2 The Great Poets as Religions Teachers. 

of vexation, Faust expresses his wish that 
the place might be destroyed. Mephis- 
topheles immediately, without the knowl- 
edge of Faust, sets fire to the cottage, 
which with its inmates is at once destroyed. 
" One funeral pile consumes " them all. 
Faust curses "the inconsiderate, savage 
blow," and refuses to take advantage of it. 
Because of the covetous and impatient 
wish, however, to which he had given ex- 
pression, he is struck blind ; but because 
he immediately regretted what he had said 
and refused to profit by it, he has at the 
same time a clearer spiritual vision than 
before. 

" The Night seems deeper now to press around me, 
But in my inmost spirit all is light; 
I rest not till the finished work hath crowned me : 
God T s Word alone confers on me the might." 

He urges on the work, and seeing al- 
ready in his mind's eye its fulfilment, he 
exclaims: — 

" A land like Paradise here, round about. 



Thus here, by dangers girt, shall glide away 
Of childhood, manhood, age, the vigorous day: 
And such a throng I fain would see, — 
Stand on free soil among a people free I J> 



Goethe. 135 

While thus absorbed, and glowing with 
ecstacy at the thought of the happiness 
which he is to impart to generations yet 
unborn, he hails the fleeting moment with 
the fatal words : — 

" Ah, still delay — thou art so fair! 
The traces cannot, of my earthly being, 
In aeons perish, — they are there! — 
In proud fore-feeling of such lofty bliss, 
I now enjoy the highest Moment, — this!" 

In that first happy moment of his whole 
life, being now a hundred years old, Faust 
sinks back, and dies. 

Mephistopheles, moralizing over his dead 
body, says, in chilling irony, — 

"No joy could sate him, and suffice no bliss! 
To catch but shifting shapes was his endeavor : 
The latest, poorest, emptiest Moment — this, — 
He wished to hold it fast forever. 
Me he resisted in such vigorous wise, 
But Time is lord, on earth the old man lies. 
The clock stands still — 

Chorus. Stands still! silent as midnight, now: 
The index falls. 

Meph. It falls, and it is finished, here ! " 

" The Body lies, and if the Spirit flee, 
I' 11 show it speedily my blood-signed title." 



1^4 Tt> e Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

A sharp contest for the possession of 
Faust's soul arises between Mephistopheles 
and the angels. He is overawed by them. 
In spite of his mockery, as one baffled and 
powerless, he asks : — 

" What now restrains me, that I dare not curse ? " 

The angels prevail, " bearing away the 
immortal part of Faust," and singing : — 

" Hallowed glories ! 
Round whom they brood, 
Wakes unto being 
Of bliss, with the Good. 
Join ye, the Glorified, 
Rise to your goal ! 
Airs are all purified, — 
Breathe now the Soul ! " 

The closing scene both by resemblance 
and contrast reminds us of Dante's Par- 
adiso. The holy fathers, one after another, 
break out in songs of heavenly rapture 
or in prayer : — 

" That all of mortality's 
Vain unrealities 
Die, and the Star above 
Beam but Eternal Love ! " 

" O God, soothe thou my thoughts bewildered, 
Enlighten Thou my needy heart ! " 



Goethe. 135 

Then the angels again appear, soaring 
now in the higher atmosphere, bearing still 
the immortal part of Faust, and singing : — 

"The noble Spirit now is free, 
And saved from all scheming : 
Whoe'er aspires unweariedly 
Is not beyond redeeming. 
And if he feels the grace of Love 
That from On High is given, 
The Blessed Hosts, that wait above, 
Shall welcome him to Heaven." 

But to whose hands shall he be com- 
mitted, that he may be prepared to enter 
that higher realm, and hold communion 
with those who dwell there ? This old 
man, who has spent a hundred years in 
gaining whatever knowledge the world in 
all its varying pursuits can give, is placed 
under the charge of the "Blessed Boys," 
who had been taken from the earth in their 
earliest infancy, — placed with them that 
they might " inaugurate him to the perfect 
state," even as Jesus, we read, "took a lit- 
tle child and placed him in the midst " of 
his ambitious disciples to be a teacher and 



136 The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

example to them. So, the Blessed Boys 
receive Faust, singing : — 

" Gladly receive we now 
Him, as a chrysalis: 
Therefore achieve we now 
Pledge of our bliss. 
The earth-flakes dissipate 
That cling around him ! 
See, he is fair and great! 
Divine Life hath crowned him." 

A chorus of penitent women intercede 
in his behalf with the Mater Gloriosa who 
represents the Divine Love. One of the 
Penitents, " formerly named Margaret, 
stealing closer," prays : — 

" Incline, O Maiden, 
With Mercy laden, 
In light unfading, 

Thy gracious countenance upon my bliss ! 
My loved, my lover, 
His trials over 
In yonder world, returns to me in this." 

" Behold how he each band hath cloven, 
The earthly life had round him thrown, 
And through his garb of ether woven, 
The early force of youth is shown ! 
Vouchsafe to me that I instruct him! 
Still dazzles him the day's new glare." 



Goethe. 1 37 

And to her, the Glorious Mother replies : 

"Come, lift thyself to higher spheres! 
When he has a spiritual sense of thy presence, he will follow. " 

One of the great Doctors says : — 

'* Penitents, look up, elate, 
Where she beams salvation; 
Gratefully to blessed fate 
Grow, in re-creation ! 
Be our souls, as they have been, 
Dedicate to Thee ! 
Virgin Holy, Mother, Queen, 
Goddess, gracious be ! " 

The Chorus Mysticus follows with the 
words : — 

" All things transitory 
But as symbols are sent ; 
Earth's insufficiency 
Here grows to Event: 
The Indescribable, 
Here it is done: 
The Woman-Soul leadeth 
Us upward and on." 

" In these lines,'' says Goethe, referring 
to the angels' song beginning with, "The 
noble Spirit now is free," "the key to 
Faust's rescue may be found. In Faust 
himself, an ever higher and purer form of 



138 The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

activity to the end, and the eternal Love 
coming down to his aid from above. This 
is entirely in harmony with our religious 
ideas, according to which we are not alone 
saved by our own strength, but through 
the freely-bestowed Grace of God/ 1 

No two men could be more unlike in 
character and personal habits than Dante 
and Goethe. And no two poems, involving 
substantially the same problem, could well 
stand more widely apart than the tragedy 
of "Faust" and the "Divina Commedia." 
Yet no one, I think, who is familiar with 
the Paradiso can read the last scene in 
"Faust" without being strongly reminded 
of some of the most impressive and mag- 
nificent passages in the closing cantos 
of the great Italian poet. As in Dante 
the ancient schoolmen and fathers of the 
Church, so in Goethe the holy fathers turn 
our thoughts upward into the heavenly re- 
gions. As Dante shrinks from the attempt 
to introduce God visibly, even in the per- 
son of his Son, but employs Beatrice, the 



Goethe. 139 

impersonation of Divine Wisdom, to lead 
him upward to the eternal light, so Goethe 
employs intermediate agents, Mary Magda- 
len, the woman of Samaria, Mary of Egypt, 
and yet another of the penitents, " formerly 
named Margaret," to intercede for Faust, 
not directly with God, but with the Mater 
Gloriosa, "the Eternal Womanly,'' who, as 
the impersonation of the divine Love, 
comes " down to aid him from above," and 
to "draw him ever upward and on." We 
do not find in Goethe the terrible sense of 
personal reality which belongs to the older 
poet. In grandeur of conception, in eleva- 
tion and spirituality of thought, in vivid- 
ness of coloring, in tenderness and inten- 
sity of feeling, in steadfast and all-pervad- 
ing emotions of reverence and adoration, 
the most sanguine admirers of Goethe can 
hardly find in the " Faust " any approach 
to what meets them in corresponding pas- 
sages in the Paradiso. 

There are many things in " Faust" which 
grate harshly on the sensitive nature of 



140 The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

persons delicately trained in Christian 
churches ; many things which may shock 
us by their levity, their whimsical sugges- 
tions amid sacred associations, and an ap- 
parent irreverence in dealing with what is 
highest in morals as well as religion. But 
just here, in this trifling, scoffing habit, is 
the sphere in which the Devil of the nine- 
teenth century presents his most attractive 
and dangerous allurements. It was well 
that Faust, the representative man of the 
age, should enter into it, and go through 
with the experience of its fascination, that 
so in his own person he might find out its 
shallowness. Thus only could he be en- 
abled to go on questioning one thing after 
another, till all the resources of this earthly 
life were exhausted, and it only remained 
for him to seek in a higher realm that 
which alone could satisfy him. The ap- 
parent levity, which prevails only too much 
throughout the poem, must not shut our 
eyes to the profound seriousness which 
underlies the whole fabric, thus showing 



Goethe. 141 

the sincerity of Goethe's words as illus- 
trated by this the greatest of his works : — ■ 

" Who ne'er his bread with tear-drops ate, 
And weeping on his bedside sate 
Through the long night's grief-laden hours, 
He knows you not, ye heavenly powers.*' 



The Second Part of Faust is not an easy 
poem to read. It is overloaded with a 
mass of materials too vast and various to 
be moulded into one organic whole. It 
would have been more attractive if it could 
have been completed by the spontaneous 
action of the poet's mind while the ideas 
were fresh, and the materials, less copious, 
were yielding themselves more pliantly to 
his touch. But as it is, involving in itself 
the carefully matured results of a lifelong 
experience, with an imagination absolutely 
free from all religious prepossessions, ran- 
sacking the universe of matter and spirit, 
to find something that might satisfy the 
desires of a human soul, it speaks with an 
authority which no youthful production 
could have had. 



142 The Great Poets as Religious Teachers* 

We think of Goethe as a worldly-minded 
man, who made light of many things which 
Christian men hold in reverence. But as 
a poet, he went down as few have done 
into the depths of our nature, filling out in 
his conceptions of man as man what will 
always be wanting in individual examples. 
And with the freest exercise of his inven- 
tive faculties from youth to age, the result 
of his life's work was the conviction that 
if we press on towards " an ever higher 
and purer form of activity/ ' the Eternal 
Love will come down to aid us ; and so we 
may find our satisfaction here and our sal- 
vation hereafter. He had endeavored to 
place himself outside of all accepted relig- 
ions and to reach something better than 
had yet been known, but in his ideal con- 
ceptions, following the leadings of an un- 
fettered imagination, he rested at last in 
the elementary Christian truths which he 
might have learned as a child from his 
mother's lips. 



VI. 

Old Testament Writers. 



1 1 have also spoken by the prophets, 
And I have multiplied visions, 
And used similitudes, 
By the ministry of the prophets." 

Hosea xii. iOo 



Old Testament Writers. 




T is the office of the poet to catch 
the deeper meaning suggested by 
transient objects or events, and 
so to set it forth, and infuse his spirit into 
his words, that he may cause us to see and 
feel as he does. Amid scenes of grandeur 
and beauty, his higher susceptibilities are 
touched ; emotions, affections, aspirations, 
and longings are awakened, which find no 
appropriate satisfaction or home in this 
outward world, and, to meet their demands, 
his imagination transforms the purest and 
finest objects of sense into symbols of 
something finer and higher still. Thus 
Wordsworth describes his experiences at a 
time of impassioned spiritual exaltation : — 

"And I have felt 

A presence that disturbs me with the joy 
10 



146 The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime 
Of something far more deeply interfused, 
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
And the round ocean, and the living air, 
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man : 
A motion and a spirit, that impels 
All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
And rolls through all." 

By images like these, he takes us up 
with him into his mount of vision, and en- 
ables us with him to see 

"A light that never was on sea or land, 
The consecration, and the poet's dream." 

Here is the inspiration of a great poet. 

We now pass to a very different ex- 
ample. Moses has been obliged to flee 
from Egypt in consequence of his intense 
sympathy with his enslaved and afflicted 
brethren. Born to be, under God, the 
founder of a nation, and the author of a 
religion which in its further development 
was to redeem and enlighten the world, he 
was at this time engaged in the humble 
occupation of keeping the flock of his 
father-in-law, Jethro. His great soul was 



Old Testament Writers. 147 

brooding over the sorrows of his people, 
and seeing no possibility of liberating them 
from their cruel bondage, as he moved with 
his flock from place to place amid the 
mountain fastnesses, and in the solitudes 
of the desert, 

"And he led the flock to the back side 
of the desert, and came to the mountain of 
God, even to Horeb. And the angel of 
the Lord appeared unto him in a flame of 
fire out of the midst of a bush: and he 
looked, and, behold, the bush burned with 
fire, and the bush was not consumed. And 
Moses said, I will now turn aside, and see 
this great sight, why the bush is not burnt. 
And when the Lord saw that he turned 
aside to see, God called to him out of the 
midst of the bush, and said, Moses, Moses. 
And he said, Here am I. And he said, 
Draw not nigh hither: put off thy shoes 
from off thy feet ; for the place whereon 
thou standest is holy ground. . . . And 
Moses hid his face ; for he was afraid to 
look upon God." 



148 The Great Poets as Religions Teachers. 

Thus Moses, bearing upon his heart the 
sufferings and sorrows of his people, with 
his senses divinely quickened, at a moment 
of impassioned elevation, sees in the flam- 
ing bush before him, — 

" A light that never was on sea or land." 

He hears a voice which others might not 
hear. In the consciousness of that higher 
presence, he is made to feel that the place 
whereon he stands is holy ground, and 
hides his face, fearing to look upon Him 
whom no man shall see and live. Here is 
the inspiration of a great prophet. Does it 
come from the same source as that by 
which the devout poet feels his inmost na- 
ture quickened and illuminated ? Or was 
Milton wholly mistaken in his invocation 
at the beginning of " Paradise Lost/' — 

'* Sing, Heavenly Muse, that on the secret top 
Of Oreb or of Sinai, didst inspire 
That shepherd, who first taught the chosen seed, 
In the beginning how the heavens and earth 
Rose out of chaos." 

The word inspiration has always been 
associated with the poet in his grandest 



Old Testament Writers. 149 

achievements. And it has been used es- 
pecially to suggest that quickening of the 
imagination by which he may see in man 
and his surroundings what the outward eye 
cannot see, and be able to set forth by ap- 
propriate images man's deeper nature, and 
the unseen conditions and agencies which 
are required for its growth and exercise. 

Now if by this same faculty, " the vision 
and the faculty divine/' he should be so 
inspired as to recognize and set forth dis- 
tinctly the unseen laws or forces which 
belong to the moral and spiritual universe, 
we have the conditions needed to produce 
a divine revelation. Its value must depend 
on the character of the revelation itself, 
that is, on the clearness and extent of the 
vision, and the power with which it unfolds 
to us the higher laws and conditions of our 
being, in connection with the unseen moral 
and spiritual agencies which may act with 
us or upon us. 

The form in which the inspired teacher 
presents his revelation to us must be that 



i^o The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

which is suggested to him as best adapted 
to his purpose. There is hardly any form 
of historical, biographical, or poetical com- 
position which is not thus employed in the 
Bible. The main object of the writers is 
to bring home to the minds and hearts of 
men the great truths in which their highest 
interests are involved. The literal fact, 
even in what bears the form of a historical 
statement, is often the least important ele- 
ment in the narrative; inasmuch as the 
question whether it actually occurred does 
not at all affect the deeper truth which it 
is intended to express. The lesson taught 
by the parable of the Pharisee and Publi- 
can, or by the book of Jonah, is wholly 
independent of the consideration whether 
such events ever actually took place. 

In the historical and biographical parts 
of the Old Testament, traditions handed 
down, sometimes through many genera- 
tions, are employed as vehicles of divine 
instruction. The literal truth of these tra- 
ditions is usually of small importance, com- 



Old Testament Writers. 151 

pared with the higher truths which they 
are intended to express. The writer, there- 
fore, would naturally be less anxious to ar- 
range the outside details as they actually 
occurred, than to present them in such a 
way as most powerfully and truthfully to 
set forth the higher moral and spiritual 
lessons which they are employed to con- 
vey. For this reason, and in accordance 
with the habits of the East, the main facts, 
whether true or not, are often supple- 
mented by details evidently interpolated 
by the writer, in order more effectively to 
illustrate and enforce the principal thought. 
An eminently good man dies suddenly. 
How is the event described ? " And Enoch 
walked with God ; and he was not, for God 
took him. ,, Here the inspired writer, look- 
ing beyond what the eye can see, breaks 
through the limitations of our earthly 
knowledge, and opens to his readers deeper 
experiences and wider realms of being. 
Beyond the outward and visible, he sees the 
spiritual environment in which the faithful 



1 52 the Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

servant of God had lived while on earth, 
and in which he still continues to live. 
This vital truth, as here taught, is entirely 
independent of the question whether the 
man Enoch ever actually existed. There 
is no word here to indicate a translation 
bodily from earth to heaven. 

The story of Abraham, founded evi- 
dently on old traditions, when viewed in 
any light, is a most interesting and inspir- 
ing one. It loses nothing, but on the 
other hand gains greatly, in moral and 
religious impressiveness, if we regard it as 
filled out, in many of its details, by the 
divinely inspired imagination of the writer, 
so as to bring more fully into view great les- 
sons which might not otherwise have been 
learned. Take, for example, the proposed 
sacrifice of Isaac. Circumstances may 
have arisen to convince Abraham, as was 
the case with thousands of parents in our 
civil war, that God required of him the 
sacrifice of his son. The one thing to be 
impressed forever on men's hearts by the 



Old Testament Writers. 1 53 

narrative was the readiness of the father 
to give up his son in obedience to the will 
of God. In accordance, therefore, with 
this ruling object and with the habits of 
the East, the actual facts may have been ab- 
breviated, or they may have been enlarged 
by additional details, so as to exhibit with 
the greatest vividness and truth the one 
lesson w T hich they were intended to illus- 
trate and enforce. In a similar manner, 
w r e may interpret the long and earnest col- 
loquy between Abraham and God, where 
the heart-felt intercessions of a devout 
soul for a doomed and wicked city are 
supplemented by the imagination of the 
writer, so as to fill out for us, in the words 
assigned to the Almighty, the part taken 
by God, which is usually hidden from us 
in our devotions. In like manner, the 
story of Jacob's w r restling with God, in a 
time of great personal anxiety, and refus- 
ing to let him go till he had secured his 
blessing, may be explained. By too severe 
a regard to the letter that killeth, we are 



i$4 The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

in danger of losing the spirit that giveth 
life. 

That which is deepest and most life- 
giving in the Old Testament is what we 
should cherish as alone vitally essential. 
Goethe, who had read the Bible through 
several times in his boyhood and early 
youth, says, in regard to the superficial 
objections brought against it, and which 
he could not answer, they " did not affect 
my belief in the fundamental conceptions 
which lay at the root of them all ; the sig- 
nificance of each, if not the harmony of the 
whole, I could fruitfully realize, and, alto- 
gether, I had put too much of my best soul 
into this book to be able ever afterwards 
to dispense with it as part of my spiritual 
nourishment. This enlistment of my best 
feelings on the side of the book made me 
proof through life against whatever sneers 
or raillery I might find directed against it ; 
for the spiritual good of which I had been 
partaker from the book had convinced me 
experimentally of the dishonesty of all such 



Old Testament Writers. 755 

irreverent assaults. On the other hand, 
any kind of thorough critical research hon- 
estly meant was grateful to me ; all ex- 
tension of our knowledge with regard to 
Oriental localities and costumes I appropri- 
ated eagerly, and I employed them without 
fear in the large and liberal interpretation 
of the traditions which my spiritual experi- 
ence had made so dear to me." 

It is thus that the writings of the Old 
Testament may always fill an important 
part in the spiritual education of the young. 
Abraham, Moses, Samuel, David, and the 
rest, in the acts and words attributed to 
them, stand before us to-day as examples 
or teachers of an ideal thought and wor- 
ship, and may help to quicken our devo- 
tions, and lift us up through higher or more 
vivid conceptions into holier and better 
lives. They were not perfect. Their vis- 
ion was not unobstructed. They "were 
men of like passions with ourselves." And 
therefore all the more are they able to 
awaken our sympathies and help us in the 



1^6 The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

doubts, perplexities, misgivings, and short- 
comings which we share with them. 

The book of Job, with its solemn ques- 
tionings, its tender pathos, its hallowed mo- 
ments of assurance, its strugglings against 
doubt, its painful attempts to explain the 
mysteries of evil amidst the heaviest trials 
that can befall a good man, may not wholly 
satisfy our reason ; but as a divine tragedy 
it may come to us in our sicknesses and 
sorrows with a strange power of healing, 
and point out to us the direction in which 
we must go if we would pass from dark- 
ness to light, setting before us the experi- 
ences of one who has tried all the expedi- 
ents of earthly success and failure and 
found them wanting. 

The book of Ecclesiastes deals with the 
problem which Goethe used a lifetime in the 
attempt to solve, and ends in the only sat- 
isfactory " conclusion of the whole matter " 
then possible. " Fear God ; and keep his 
commandments : for this is the whole duty 
of man. For God shall bring every work 



Old Testament Writers. 15J 

into judgment, with every secret thing, 
whether it be good or whether it be evil." 

" By the inspiration of the Almighty," 
these writers were lifted above themselves, 
and from that elevation, in flashings from 
the great central light, they saw more 
clearly and farther than others could see. 
Where their reasonings failed, their spirit- 
ual intuitions or powers of vision left no 
room for doubt. From the depths of hu- 
miliation and penitence, after the commis- 
sion of a most heinous crime, came the 
Miserere, in which the burdened heart of 
our sinful humanity still finds comfort and 
relief. The words, " I know that my Re- 
deemer liveth," wrenched from a trusting 
soul by the sharpest anguish, in the light 
of the New Testament have taken on a 
meaning which the writer could not have 
foreseen, and, associated as they are with 
heavenly strains of music, come as a voice 
from heaven with their blessed assurance 
to millions of weary and sorrowing mortals. 

Of this same goodly fellowship were the 



158 The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

extraordinary men who had such an influ- 
ence with the Jewish people in the later 
days of the monarchy, and whose writings, 
through all succeeding ages, have been 
marked by their prophetic character. The 
highest reaches of the imagination in the 
moral world are always prophecies. He 
who most vividly sees what is in man sees 
also how indissolubly his fortunes, in the 
long run, are bound up with his obedience 
or disobedience to the laws of his moral 
and spiritual being. In following those 
laws on as ruling forces in the conduct of 
men or nations, he is able to foresee and 
predict future events. And what is true 
in the particular case before him is true 
for all time. That which was a prophecy 
for the Jews is a prophecy for us to-day, 
revealing to us as it does the working of 
those laws by which alone we can live. Be- 
cause the Jewish prophets looked through 
the fleeting phenomena around them into 
the eternal laws by which human actions 
are to be governed and the destiny of men 



Old Testament Writers. 159 

and nations determined, the predictions 
they uttered for their own people still re- 
tain their prophetic character, and stand 
as solemn lessons for us and for all com- 
ing ages. 

This power of associating future events 
with moral conditions so as to read the 
fortunes of the future in the character of 
the present, and in a corrupt age to divine 
the qualities which alone can redeem a sin- 
ful people, and give them a universal influ- 
ence among the nations, was possessed by 
no one of the Jewish prophets in so re- 
markable a degree as by the writer of the 
closing chapters of Isaiah. It was a time of 
national humiliation and disaster. " Zion 
is a wilderness ; Jerusalem a desolation. 
Our holy and beautiful house where our 
fathers praised thee, is burned up with fire, 
and all our pleasant things are laid waste." 
But through and beyond it all, with pro- 
phetic vision, he sees, for his regenerated 
people, "a new heaven and a new earth." 
But who is to be this great deliverer ? 



i6o The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

No conquering hero. No mighty ruler. 
" When we shall see him there is no beauty 
that we should desire him. He is despised 
and rejected of men: a man of sorrows 
and acquainted with grief : and we hid as 
it were our faces from him." " Surely he 
hath borne our griefs and carried our sor- 
rows : yet we did esteem him stricken of 
God, and afflicted. But he was wounded 
for our transgressions, he was bruised for 
our iniquities : the chastisement of our 
peace was upon him ; and with his stripes 
we are healed. " 

He who amid overwhelming national 
calamities and apparent ruin could see in 
such an one the Saviour, not of the nation 
alone, but of the world, must have gone 
down into the deepest wants and capabil- 
ities of our nature, and have had, as no one 
around him had, a prevision of the moral 
and spiritual qualities which can regen- 
erate men's souls, and establish an ever- 
lasting kingdom on the earth. He may, by 
the special " inspiration of the Almighty," 



Old Testament Writers. 161 

have been enabled to foresee, as a distinct 
individual, "him who was to come." Or 
his conception of the servant of God, un- 
der the only type of manhood in which he 
could redeem the world, may have been 
filled out for him by an exercise of the 
imagination equally sublime and equally 
inspired. And in that conception, he may 
have combined unconsciously the leading 
features of him who centuries later came 
to fill out, in his own thought and person, 
all that was wanting in those who had gone 
before. In either case, the writer's lan- 
guage was then, as it is now, a prophecy 
to the human soul of him, the ideal man, 
who alone, embosomed in the mind and 
heart of God, can meet its deepest and 
highest wants. 

Towards this central figure in the his- 
tory of our race, consciously or uncon- 
sciously, the yearnings of devout souls 
had been reaching forward. The greatest 
prophets in their moments of fullest inspi- 
ration and exaltation acknowledged their 



1 62 The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

own insufficiency. As Jesus said of them : 
" They did but prophesy." All that went 
before, the grandest reach of the imagi- 
nation on the part of the loftiest, purest, 
and most richly endowed among the sons 
of men, even in their most inspired utter- 
ances, gave only foreshadowings, intima- 
tions, darkly or dimly awakening expec- 
tations, of some one greater still, in whom, 
not broken fragments of a disordered hu- 
manity, but all the fulness of man united in 
perfect harmony with God, and so all the 
fulness of God, should dwell. As point- 
ing to this diviner light, and unfolding 
tenderly and powerfully to us a want which 
all may feel, these ancient prophetic writ- 
ings are of unspeakable value still. Their 
longings for something better, their in- 
complete but still advancing ideas, their 
revelations, imperfect indeed, but conscious 
of imperfection, and looking forward to one 
greater yet to fill out what was wanting in 
them, may do much to help us in our ap- 
proaches to that which is the fulfilment 
alike of law and prophecy. 



VII. 
The Ideal Teachings of Jesus. 



" The flesh profiteth nothing : the words that I speak unto you 
they are spirit, and they are life." John vi. 63. 



The Ideal Teachings of Jesus. 




^ROM the greatest of the prophets to 
him in whom their highest proph- 
ecies were more than fulfilled is a 
long step upwards, and we shrink from ap- 
plying to him the sort of language we have 
used in speaking of them. It strikes us 
unpleasantly to hear him spoken of as the 
greatest of all the poets of humanity, and 
his teachings as embodying in form and 
substance the highest possible ideal concep- 
tions of man, and the sphere of activities, 
human and divine, in which the full pur- 
poses of our being are to be accomplished. 
We think of him not only as supreme 
among the sons of men, but as standing 
apart by himself, above all principalities 
and powers. But in this we forget the pre- 
eminent characteristic of his greatness. 



1 66 The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

The greatness of earthly ambition separates 
a man from his race. It lifts him up into 
an icy isolation from which he looks down 
with pride and distrust on his fellow-men. 
But the greatness of Jesus only brings him 
into closer fellowship with man. If he was 
one with God, it was that he might draw us 
also into the same perfect sympathy and 
union, — " as thou, Father, art in me and I 
in thee, that they also may be one in lis," 
Our human nature is thus, as he would 
teach, enfolded in the divine. And in or- 
der to lift us up into this life-giving union, 
Jesus places himself on the plane of our 
common humanity. Whatever more he 
may have been, as man or God, he came 
here as the Son of man, subject to our hu- 
man infirmities and trials, bearing our sick- 
nesses that so he might be brought into 
closer relationship with us. The son of 
God in truth he was ; but it was as a man, 
with human faculties, human sympathies, 
human affections, human methods of ac- 
tion, and human forms of speech, that he 



The Ideal Teachings of Jesus. i6y 

could bring down his divine thought and 
life to the heart of our humanity, and thus 
reach and regenerate the souls of men. 

We cannot enter into the mind of Jesus 
as we enter into the mind of Dante or Mil- 
ton, or of David and Isaiah, or even of St. 
Paul. We cannot understand how it was 
that the whole universe became to him a 
transparent medium, in which he saw and 
felt the workings of the Supreme mind, 
through laws and agencies unseen by those 
around him. And to apply to his words 
the terms which we apply to other writ- 
ings, or to subject them to the same meth- 
ods of examination, seems like an act of 
profanation. We shrink from using in 
this connection the term ideal or imagina- 
tive, as if we were thus lowering the char- 
acter of his instructions. 

But it is only from a human standpoint 
that he can speak to us so as to be under- 
stood. However clear the " vision" with 
which he looked into things human and 
divine, and however beyond appeal the 



1 68 The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

authority with which he speaks, it is only 
by using the forms of speech most expres- 
sive to us that he can make us partakers of 
his thought. And it is only by the exer- 
cise of our limited human faculties, and by 
employing the ordinary rules of investiga- 
tion, that we can interpret his teachings. 

As in all other cases, therefore, before 
and since his time, so also with him, the 
loftiest and most effective utterances of 
moral and spiritual truth must come as 
they do come to us, through the imagina- 
tion, — the divining and creative faculty. 
He saw in the humble flower before him, 
as the source of its life, a creative act of 
God, and in each fragment of a human 
life he saw the law that pervades and gov- 
erns the whole of our moral being. Each 
visible fact is filled out, to his mind, by the 
unseen law, and by the influences and the 
yet undeveloped results which are indisso- 
lubly bound up with it. With powers of 
vision more penetrating and comprehen- 
sive than have ever been known among 



The Ideal Teachings of Jesus. 169 

men, he saw, as no one else ever did, the 
unseen but ever present elements of power, 
justice, love, which are involved in appar- 
ently insignificant objects and events, and 
which are the fundamental laws of life and 
of human society. And what he thus saw 
he set forth by images which appeal 
through the imagination to the minds of 
those whom he would address. 

Living, as he did, in what is to us an 
ideal world, in the bosom of God, at the 
centre of all moral and spiritual influences, 
the words he uses are saturated with its 
spirit, and filled out, through his deeper in- 
sight and by his creative imagination, with 
a meaning which it is often very difficult 
for us to appreciate. As one who visits 
the home of his childhood sees around him 
dear forms, which others cannot see, and 
every silent stone or tree awakens affect- 
ing memories, and touches chords of emo- 
tion which others may not understand, so 
Jesus sees everywhere tokens of a diviner 
presence, a deeper life, holier and more 



i jo The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

beneficent purposes and influences, than 
those who live on a lower plane can fully 
comprehend. His simplest expressions, 
therefore, often come to us charged with a 
richer and deeper meaning than we are 
prepared at once to recognize. 

One of the truest tests of imaginative 
genius shows itself in the power of en- 
dowing common words with a significance 
beyond what originally belonged to them. 
Dante speaks of being obliged to give to 
the language employed by him a meaning 
which it never had before, and the skill 
with which he causes material images to 
suggest facts belonging to a higher range 
of experience strikes us as one of the most 
marvellous features of his great work. The 
same faculty shows itself in Shakspere, 
running through his writings as lightning 
through the telegraph wires, making them 
mediums of a higher intelligence than is 
patent on the surface. 

Far above all other writings, in this re- 
spect, are the Gospels. They who receive 



The Ideal Teachings of Jesus. iji 

them only in a literal sense know not what 
they are. Most of us, however, are so ac- 
customed to take them in a higher sense, 
that we lose sight of their literal meaning, 
and forget the power by which those sim- 
ple words have been made effective in cre- 
ating a new heaven and a new earth for 
those who receive them into their hearts. 
We have only to repeat the most familiar 
passages, to see how easily and naturally 
Jesus has taken words up from their hum- 
ble or homely belongings, and made them 
harbingers of a divine message. " I have 
meat to eat that ye know not of." " Pray 
ye the lord of the harvest that he will send 
forth laborers into his harvest." " The mar- 
riage feast." "The pearl of great price." 
Perhaps no word has been more entirely 
transfigured, enlarged, changed from the 
transient to the eternal, than the word 
"life," as it enters into our Christian con- 
sciousness, bearing with it the deeper, 
broader, more vital ideas and associations 
which he has infused into it, and through 



1J2 The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

which the world itself has become regen- 
erated. 

Jesus sees in all outward objects the em- 
blems of something higher than them- 
selves. In nature he recognizes a divine 
presence, acting everywhere as a perpetu- 
ally renewing and creative energy. When 
therefore he speaks of natural objects, he 
speaks as one who sees what no chemist 
or naturalist has ever seen. Thus he fills 
out the visible beauty of common flowers 
with the ever-present agency of Him who 
" so clothes the grass of the field " " that 
even Solomon in all his glory was not ar- 
rayed like one of these." To his mind, 
the falling sparrow in its apparent isolation 
and helplessness is followed in its descent 
by the pitying eye of God. 

Not in the material world, however, but 
in man does he find the highest expression, 
and the truest image that is given in na- 
ture, of the creative mind. He does not 
speak of God as a law, an all-pervading, 
impersonal presence or influence, though 



The Ideal Teachings of Jesus. 173 

he recognizes Him in that capacity. From 
man, the highest type of existence visible 
to us, — higher than the sun or stars, and 
governed by higher laws, — he has bor- 
rowed the words, " Our Father who art in 
heaven," by which he would bring home to 
our hearts the truest and most affecting 
thought of God. As with the greatest 
poets, so with Jesus also, man is the ob- 
ject of paramount interest. " He knew 
what was in man ; " and no one else has 
filled out the sphere of man's capabilities, 
the supreme laws of his being, or the sphere 
of influences acting upon him, on so com- 
plete and so vast a scale. To his mind, 
the human soul, so divinely endowed, is 
greater and of more value than the mate- 
rial universe. " What shall it profit a man 
if he gain the whole world and lose his own 
soul ? " This conception of the unspeak- 
able value of the soul and the closeness 
of its relationship to God runs through 
all his teachings, and lends an ideal charm 
and dignity to our common duties and rela- 



i?4 The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

tions. Into our homes, permeated and 
presided over by the divine love, he would 
bring a source of perennial joy and beauty 
by greater purity of heart and a more de- 
voted union of husband and wife. And 
while thus securing by indissoluble ties 
the closest of earthly relations, he fills out 
the thought of these family endearments, 
and gives them a healthful enlargement, 
by throwing around our homes, and bring- 
ing into them as a vital force, a more com- 
prehensive ideal of brotherhood. " My 
mother and my brethren are these which 
hear the word of God and do it" " Inas- 
much as ye have done it unto one of the 
least of these my brethren ye have done it 
unto me." A Christian home is thus the 
ideal centre of affections which reach up 
to the fountain of all love and blessedness, 
while they also reach out to all around in 
silent benedictions, in kindly words, and 
tender benefactions, uniting entire neigh- 
borhoods, and indeed the whole human fam- 
ily, within the same ideal brotherhood. To 



The Ideal Teachings of Jesus. 775 

his enlarged conception, they who should 
come in from the north and the south, 
from the east and the west, the living and 
the dead, were to be, as Paul has said, one 
family "on earth and in heaven." What 
an expansive stretch of the imagination 
does it require to take in this conception 
in all its sweetness and extent ! 

I know of no imaginative writings among 
the poets which take us into such a realm 
of ideal life and beauty as the Beati- 
tudes, revealing to us mental and moral 
conditions, and ever-present influences and 
satisfactions, which exceed in value all out- 
ward possessions, and transform disappoint- 
ments, privations, and sorrows into instru- 
ments of love and of a transcendent 
blessedness. Here he brings home to the 
poor in spirit the kingdom of heaven as 
already theirs, and bears witness to an at- 
mosphere so clear that they who live in it 
— the pure in heart — shall see God. 

Everywhere in the Gospels, by what in 
any other teacher we should call the trans- 



iy6 The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

figuring power of the imagination, images 
drawn from things material, and apparently 
commonplace and evanescent, are filled 
out by suggestions which take us up into 
what is eternal and divine. At the temple 
in Jerusalem, amid the profuse and osten- 
tatious offerings of the rich, a certain poor 
widow came and threw in two mites equal 
to a farthing, — a very ordinary act, a very 
mean sort of a person, it must have ap- 
peared to those who were looking on. But 
there was one present who was able to 
put himself in her place, to divine her 
thought, and, beyond what others saw, to 
appreciate her secret motives in the great 
sacrifice she was making. And in the 
light thus thrown around it, that appar- 
ently insignificant act was taken out of the 
sphere of perishing things, and has been 
through all the ages an encouragement and 
help to those — the poor and the friend- 
less — who have needed it most. The box 
of precious ointment poured upon the feet 
of Jesus awakened in Judas only feelings 



The Ideal Teachings of Jesus. ijy 

of indignation, and even to others of the 
disciples seemed a needless waste. But 
in the spirit which prompted it, Jesus saw 
the unselfish, reverential love which de- 
lighted so to express itself ; and through his 
words, that act, filling then the house with 
its fragrance, has gone with a still more 
grateful perfume wherever his gospel has 
been preached throughout the whole world, 
" a memorial of her," and a symbol of what 
is most beautiful in the holiest affections, 
touched and uplifted by a thankful rever- 
ence. Where among all the great works of 
genius do we find a simple act like this so 
taken out of the sphere of transient events 
by the creative imagination of the poet, 
and so embalmed and glorified as to create 
a new world of beauty, and throw its light 
and charm around every similar act ? For 
here, by canonizing this lowly act, Jesus 
has created for us also an ideal world of 
refined tastes and sentiments, in which 
our most delicate instincts, our holiest and 
most self-forgetting affections, may delight 
to dwell. 



iy8 The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

Once, as Jesus stood by the lakeside, 
behold, " A sower went forth to sow," and 
straightway, through his creative words 
and presence, the whole outward scene is 
transformed into a sphere of invisible 
agencies, in whose workings man's eter- 
nal interests are involved. " The field is 
the world, the good seed are the chil- 
dren of the kingdom." "The harvest is 
the consummation of the age, and the 
reapers are the angels." 

In the greatest poems, there are little 
secluded nooks, secret confessionals, or 
domestic scenes, and private conversations, 
which are very dear to us, as they go al- 
ways with us, and, more than any private 
cabinet of jewels, help to enrich and beau- 
tify our chambers of imagery. The part- 
ing of Hector and Andromache in Homer's 
Iliad, the story which Dante tells of Fran- 
cesca da Rimini, and of his first meeting 
with Beatrice after she had " risen from 
body to spirit," the few loving words of 
Cordelia to her father when he had been 



The Ideal Teachings of Jesus. 179 

left in utter wretchedness and desolation, 
are passages of this sort, and show in each 
poet the highest point that he ever at- 
tained. The atmosphere which scenes like 
these have once created around us has so 
associated itself with our dearest thoughts 
that it abides with us always. 

Such passages abound in the Gospels 
far more than in all the great poets. Al- 
most every word of Jesus comes to us with 
its far-reaching suggestions, and its re- 
fining, uplifting influences. Common in- 
cidents or familiar objects are filled out 
with ideas which take us into sweeter and 
higher realms. The heaven in which he 
lived infuses itself into all his thoughts, 
gives its ideal coloring to his language, and 
so folds itself around us as a living atmos- 
phere. Compared with the world in which 
he lived and moved as in his native ele- 
ment, and whose spirit is breathed around 
us now by his words, the grandest creations 
of other poets, except in what they borrow 
from him, seem poverty-stricken. Even 



180 The Great Poets as Religious Teachers, 

" Isaiah's hallowed strains " seem hardly 
more than the earnest gropings and smug- 
glings of a half-illuminated mind, moved by 
a divine impulse, and feeling its way up- 
ward towards the light. 

From our easy familiarity with the Gos- 
pels, and the mechanical manner in which 
we have come to think and speak of them, 
we fail to see them as they are, and to 
recognize in them the creative power that 
should act on us and open our eyes to new 
worlds of thought, affection, and emotion. 
And what is it but the ideal element inter- 
fused through them that gives such a power 
to v/hat would otherwise seem like very 
simple expressions ? " The foxes have 
holes, the birds of the air have nests, but 
the Son of man hath not where to lay his 
head." Yet homeless and shelterless as 
he was, at that very moment he was asking 
men to follow him as their highest privi- 
lege and joy. 

What but the ideal thought in which 
he lived and with which his whole being 



The Ideal Teachings of Jesus. 181 

was saturated has thrown such a world of 
pathos and such a divine fascination and 
power into the words, "O Jerusalem, Je- 
rusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and 
stonest them which are sent unto thee, 
how often would I have gathered thy chil- 
dren together even as a hen gathereth her 
chickens under her wings, and ye would 
not ! " Or where else shall we find words 
which have such a divine sweetness, and 
such a world of tender healing and com- 
fort, as in his gracious invitation : " Come 
unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy 
laden, and I will give you rest. Take my 
yoke upon you and learn of me, for I am 
meek and lowly in heart, and ye shall find 
rest unto your souls." Where among the 
poets do we find single expressions which 
come to us with such power to take us be- 
yond their literal meaning into unseen soul- 
satisfying realities ? Or what single pic- 
ture or episode in any of the great Epics 
or Tragedies appeals so powerfully to the 
imagination as the story of The Pharisee 



182 The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

and Publican, The Prodigal Son, or The 
Rich Man and Lazarus ? The more criti- 
cally we examine them as works of the im- 
agination, the more perfect we shall find 
them both in form and substance ; and the 
more entirely we give ourselves up to them, 
the more shall we be impressed by a sense 
of " the virtue " which may come out from 
them, to touch our moral and spiritual 
sensibilities, to heal our diseases, and to 
quicken our holiest affections. 

Or, if we seek for creations on a grander 
scale, I know of no place in all the realm 
of poetic creations, where we may find any- 
thing to compare with the twenty-fourth 
and twenty-fifth chapters of Matthew in 
sublimity and pathos, in breadth and lofti- 
ness of conception, in elevation of sen- 
timent or in depth of spiritual insight. In 
the progress of the narrative we feel that a 
deepening solemnity has been gathering 
round us. At last, with one majestic sweep 
of the imagination, Jesus, looking through 
the ages, brings into one vast perspective 



The Ideal Teachings of Jesus. 183 

all the generations of men, to undergo the 
great ordeal through which each individual 
soul must pass, — men's actions here in 
their separate and solemn distinctions fol- 
lowing them on from time to eternity. Yet 
so wonderfully drawn is the picture, that 
in all this application of inexorable law, 
room is left for the manifestation of per- 
sonal feeling, and in this countless throng 
and multitude, each individual soul stands 
before us with its own separate record, and 
its undertone of surprised joy or grief. As 
a powerful presentation of the most ma- 
jestic, the most affecting and awful images 
that can ever be suggested to the mind of 
man, the poetry of the world furnishes no 
parallel to the passage beginning with the 
words, "When the Son of man shall come 
in his glory, and all the holy angels with 
him, then shall he sit upon the throne of 
his glory, and before him shall be gathered 
all nations." 

Outward, visible, material images are em- 
ployed to set forth facts of the profoundest 



1 84 The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

spiritual significance. No literal interpre- 
tation meets the conditions of the case. 
Dante, as we have seen, speaking of a 
nobleman who, having invited friends to a 
feast at his house, caused them to be mur- 
dered there, tells us that when that act of 
treachery and murder was done, the soul 
of the murderer was immediately hurried 
down into one of the lowest depths of hell, 
and that his body, which remained alive in 
Genoa, was thenceforth possessed and ani- 
mated by a devil. More impressive lan- 
guage could not be used to express a great 
and terrible fact. But no one now would 
take it, as some of his contemporaries did, 
to be interpreted literally in all its details. 
In the parables of Jesus, in accordance 
with the laws of human thought and the 
necessities of language, images the most 
touching, majestic, and awful ever pre- 
sented to the mind of man are brought 
forward, to give an added vividness to the 
scene, and to awaken in us some sense of 
the momentous issues for weal or woe in- 



The Lie j I I each in gs of Jesus. 185 

volvecl in our conduct here. But the imag- 
ery in its separate parts is to be regarded 
only as the superficial vehicle in which the 
more vital and substantial thought and im- 
pression are conveyed. 

I have gone somewhat into detail in the 
treatment of my subject. Viewed simply 
in this light, as works of the imagination, 
the teachings of Jesus have a vitality, a 
suggestiveness, a tenderness, a majesty, a 
quickening power, a beauty, and a grandeur 
so surpassingly great and peculiar that in 
all these eighteen hundred years no man, 
however lofty his genius, no Dante or 
Shakspere or Milton or Goethe, has ever 
added to his words a single sentence wdiich 
the best minds of the world would judge 
worthy of his utterance. 

Let us for a few moments look at our 
subject in a more comprehensive light. 
Dante did much to deepen the moral con- 
victions of men, to enlarge, to deepen and 
intensify their spiritual conceptions, and to 
rive them a new sense of reality in regard 



i86 The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

to the deepest interests of life and the un- 
seen agencies around them. Shakspere 
invented new forms of intelligence and 
beauty, love and devotion, new examples 
of thought and life, which have revealed 
in man new capabilities, wants, and affec- 
tions. He has thus enlarged the sphere 
of human interests and activities. As to 
what is highest in both these mighty gen- 
iuses, — they drew their inspiration and 
their ideas from one in whose footsteps 
they reverently counted it a privilege and 
an honor to be permitted to walk. 

It is difficult to look in this larger way 
at what Jesus has done to fill out our con- 
ceptions of what is holiest and best in our 
human life and conduct, in our relations to 
one another, and in the intimate and vital 
union which may exist between man and 
God, or our connection with his unseen 
presence and kingdom. From the open- 
ing words of the Sermon on the Mount to 
his last affecting words upon the cross, 
" Father, into thy hands I commit my 



The Ideal Teachings of Jesus. iSy 

spirit," he takes us through what is to us 
an ideal realm. He fills it out with images 
of fidelity, justice, love, and mercy, human 
and divine, which reach down into the in- 
most depths of our being, and, with our 
advancing powers of thought and our per- 
petually renewed spiritual perceptions, cre- 
ate around us an ever enlarging sphere, in 
which all our best faculties may find their 
fitting exercise and enjoyment. In that 
ideal realm he lived. Its reality was the 
one all-pervading and controlling fact. By 
word or deed, by miracle or parable, with 
the poor Syro-Phoenician woman or on the 
mountain of transfiguration, in private con- 
ference with his disciples or in the temple 
confronting the leading men of his nation 
with words of terrible significance, — from 
his baptism in the Jordan to his last vis- 
ible appearance on the Mount of Olives, 
whatever he did or said or was comes to 
us filled out by the consciousness of that 
ideal realm. His lightest words, hardly 
less than his gravest instructions, suggest 



1 88 The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

it to us, as it always lay in his mind. The 
sight of the ravens or the lilies calls up the 
thought of him who feeds or clothes them. 
Or, to take one example more, as a fitting 
close to what I have to say, in this direc- 
tion, of him who came to exalt the humble, 
and to save that which is lost : " Either 
what woman having ten pieces of silver, if 
she lose one piece, doth not light a candle, 
and sweep the house, and seek diligently 
till she find it ? And when she hath found 
it, she calleth her friends and her neigh- 
bors together, saying, Rejoice with me; 
for I have found the piece which I had 
lost. Likewise, I say unto you, there is 
joy in the presence of the angels of God, 
over one sinner that repenteth. ,, Where 
among the great poets do we find objects 
apparently so ordinary and commonplace 
endowed with the power of lifting us up to 
a thought so affecting and sublime ? By 
these homely images, the shilling that was 
lost, the woman who sought diligently till 
she had found it, and the friends and 



The Ideal Teachings of Jesus. i8g 

neighbors whom she called in to rejoice 
with her, Jesus sets before us the loving 
sympathy of the angels in heaven with 
every sinful one on earth who turns again 
to God. Everywhere he sees something 
that is to him most tender, majestic, and 
beautiful in the homeliest of human inter- 
ests and relations, and lifts them up into a 
grander significance and beauty by associ- 
ating them, in the closest possible union, 
with what is divine. 

Very wonderful, as viewed in this light, 
are the teachings of Jesus. But still more 
wonderful is the manner in which, by the 
transforming power of the imagination, 
he identifies himself with his teachings. 
When the Jews, in perplexity and anger, 
scoffingly asked of him, " Who art thou?" 
he answered them in substance, " What 
I say to you that essentially (TV &pxqv)-l 
am." (John viii. 25.) So perfectly was he, 
in his daily thoughts and acts, and in his 
entire being, bound up with what is high- 
est in morals and religion, that he comes 



1 90 The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

to us as the illustration and embodiment 
of what he taught. Living, as he did, in 
perfect union with God, all the higher 
faculties of our nature were unfolded, and 
all the divine qualities and attributes 
which can exist in a human form were 
incarnated in him, so that we have in 
him an expression of the grandest possi- 
bilities of man, and of the fullest mani- 
festation that can be given of the mind 
and character of God. In the conscious- 
ness of the indwelling presence of God, he 
identified his own thoughts with the sug- 
gestions of the divine mind, and thus iden- 
tified himself with God. " I and my Fa- 
ther are one." The coming of the Son of 
Man was, in his thought, the same as the 
coming of the kingdom of God. And he 
regarded as his ministers or angels, all 
the divine agencies by which his work was 
to be carried out, and spoke of himself as 
directing them in the struggles and trials 
through which his religion should pass, as 
well as in its triumphant progress. Of 



The Ideal Teachings of Jesus . 191 

this fact we have remarkable examples in 
the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth chap- 
ters of Matthew, and in his last conversa- 
tion with his disciples, as given to us in 
the Gospel of John. 

Here, in the identification of himself 
with his teachings and his work, and, 
above all, with Him in whom he lived, is 
that which separates him from all other 
teachers, giving him " a name above every 
name/' and exalting his ideal conceptions 
above every other " principality and power." 
His consciousness of his own human per- 
sonality was often lost in the consciousness 
of God's indwelling presence, so entirely 
did he live in harmony, or rather in uni- 
son, with God. This oneness with his Fa- 
ther, which is most distinctly brought out 
and emphasized in the fourth Gospel, gives 
a transcendent grace and attractiveness to 
the loftiest expressions recorded by the 
other evangelists. Bearing in mind that 
his thoughts came to him, or rather un- 
folded themselves within him, as prompt- 



192 The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

ings from the mind and heart of God, we 
may appreciate his feeling, when he says, 
" The words that I speak unto you, they are 
spirit and they are life." 




VIII. 

The End. 



"And when all things shall be subdued unto him, then shall the 
Son also himself be subject unto him that put all things under him, 
that God may be all in all." — i Corinthians xv. 28. 



The End. 




HIS little book, in its treatment 
of a great subject, lays no claim 
to completeness It deals rather 
with hints and illustrations of facts which, 
when subjected to a thorough analysis and 
carried forward to their legitimate results, 
may, I think, be found to include the 
most affecting and effective truths of our 
religion. The one underlying thought, 
which gives a meaning to all the rest, is 
that of God everywhere, the central force, 
the quickening life, the guiding intelli- 
gence, by whom all created things are 
united in one harmonious system, each 
dependent on all, and all on each. Each 
therefore is united with all the rest, and 
with Him who "is over all, and in all, and 
through all." If, then, any single object 



ig6 The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

could be fully known by us in all its rela- 
tions, immediate and remote, it would re- 
veal to us the whole order of the universe, 
and the mind of Him. who sustains it in 
every part, and carries it onward by a per- 
petual and progressive act of creation. 
Man, as the highest type of creation per- 
sonally known to us, may be regarded as 
being, in himself, the most advanced ex- 
pression of the mind of God to be found 
among created things. And they who 
have the profoundest insight into his ca- 
pabilities, active or dormant, must see 
most clearly the higher laws of his nature, 
and the facts connected with his moral 
and spiritual constitution. The great poets 
of humanity, therefore, may be summoned, 
as competent witnesses, to testify to the 
higher faculties of our nature, and to the 
beliefs and wants which are essential to 
their healthy and complete development. 
As we rise, by lines of gradation not al- 
ways perceptible, through different degrees 
of " the inspiration of the Almighty, which 



The End. igy 

giveth understanding," we are introduced 
to the long line of poets, seers, and proph- 
ets, who, in the higher development and 
advancing intelligence of the race, have 
unfolded to us, more and more distinctly, 
the laws of our spiritual being, and the 
touching and sublime facts connected with 
them. At last, we come to one fore- 
shadowed indeed by them, in whom their 
grandest ideas have something far more 
than their fulfilment. 

And here, as we enter into his thought 
and life, we are vitally connected with in- 
fluences which unite earth and heaven, 
and bring us everywhere into sympathy 
with what is divine. Our highest thoughts 
and our deepest experiences associate 
themselves with the eternal life, and make 
it ours. The desires of the ungodly shall 
perish. The love of the selfish and the 
sensuous shall die. But that which brings 
us into oneness with Christ brings us into 
oneness with God, and makes us and all 
that essentially belongs to us immortal. 



ig8 The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

The golden experiences of the past come 
transfigured before us, and lift our eyes 
upward to a holier companionship. Earthly- 
desires are transmuted into heavenly affec- 
tions. Whatever we have known and 
loved takes on a diviner meaning, as we 
live and believe in him who is the resur- 
rection and the life. 

For in him the Word was made flesh. 
All of the divine intelligence and attri- 
butes that can be incorporated in a human 
life were incarnated in him. Ideas sug- 
gested to poets and prophets in their mo- 
ments of loftiest inspiration are filled out 
with a diviner meaning in the teachings of 
Jesus. And his teachings have their most 
living and life-giving exemplification and 
manifestation in the august and wonder- 
ful personality, human and divine, of the 
teacher. The Incarnation, " God in Christ 
reconciling the world to himself/' and, 
therefore, God in humanity, a redeeming, 
sanctifying presence, is the great doctrine 
of the New Testament. But the world 



The End. igg 

has been slow to receive it. Through ages 
of darkness and sin it has been struggling 
to gain admittance to the souls of men. 
Even now the language of its great exem- 
plar is, " Behold, I stand at the door and 
knock.' ' And few are ready to accept the 
conditions and make the sacrifices which 
he requires of them, that they may know 
the blessedness of giving themselves up 
entirely to him. 

Nevertheless, the prophetic vision is no 
illusion. The sign of the Son of Man may 
not be recognized by us ; but he is coming 
in the heavens with power and great glory. 
The more deeply we enter into his spirit, 
and the more fully we partake of the life 
that was in him, the more shall we be sus- 
tained and gladdened by the divine assur- 
ance. Therefore it is that we look for- 
ward " in sure and certain hope " to the 
day when the beneficent purposes of his 
Advent shall be accomplished, when the 
whole family of man shall be included in 
his prayer, " that they all may be one, as 



200 The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. 

thou, Father, art in me and I in thee, that 
they also may be one in us," and when 
the prayer itself, in its largest and most 
catholic sense, shall be fulfilled by the 
perfect union of man with God. 




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